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The Black Death was a bubonic plague pandemic that occurred in Europe from 1346 to 1353. It was one of the most fatal pandemics in human history; as many as 50 million people [2] perished, perhaps 50% of Europe's 14th century population. [3] The disease is caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis and spread by fleas and through the air.
After first contacts with Europeans and Africans, some believe that the death of 90–95% of the native population of the New World was caused by Old World diseases. [51] It is suspected that smallpox was the chief culprit and responsible for killing nearly all of the native inhabitants of the Americas.
The first plague pandemic was the first historically recorded Old World pandemic of plague, the contagious disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. Also called the early medieval pandemic, it began with the Plague of Justinian in 541 and continued until 750 or 767. At least fifteen to eighteen major waves of plague following the ...
Disease Death toll Percentage of population lost Years Location 2 1918 Flu: Influenza A/H1N1: 17–100 million 1–5.4% of global population [4] 1918–1920 Worldwide 2 Plague of Justinian: Bubonic plague 15–100 million 25–60% of European population [5] 541–549 North Africa, Europe, and Western Asia 3 HIV/AIDS pandemic: HIV/AIDS
Smallpox was an infectious disease caused by variola virus (often called smallpox virus), which belongs to the genus Orthopoxvirus. [7] [11] The last naturally occurring case was diagnosed in October 1977, and the World Health Organization (WHO) certified the global eradication of the disease in 1980, [10] making smallpox the only human disease to have been eradicated to date.
The Black Death ravaged Europe for three years before it continued on into Russia, where the disease hit somewhere once every five or six years from 1350 to 1490. [39] Plague epidemics ravaged London in 1563, 1593, 1603, 1625, 1636, and 1665, [40] reducing its population by 10 to 30% during those years. [41]
Viral diseases of livestock can be devastating both to farmers and the wider community, as the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in the UK in 2001 showed. [228] First appearing in East Africa in 1891, rinderpest, a disease of cattle, spread rapidly across Africa. [229] By 1892, 95 per cent of the cattle in East Africa had died.
Other scholars contest that, rather than Central Asia, the specific strain that composed the Justinian plague began in sub-Saharan Africa, and that the plague was spread to the Mediterranean by merchants from the Kingdom of Aksum in East Africa. This point of origin aligns more with the general south–north spread of the disease from Egypt ...