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A list of some of the deadliest diseases in human history.
The Black Death killed one-third to half of Europe's population in the 14th century.
Medieval doctors wore distinctive beaked masks filled with herbs, believing sweet scents prevented infection.
In reality, bacteria carried by rat fleas caused the devastating plague.
Smallpox killed hundreds of millions before its eradication in 1980.
In the 18th century, people sought protection through variolation—where they exposed themselves to the virus by inhaling infected scab powder or inserting pus under their skin.
The 1918-1920 Spanish flu killed 50-100 million people, targeting healthy adults aged 20-40.
Their robust immune responses, known as cytokine storms, proved lethal, while children and the elderly often survived.
HIV/AIDS emerged in 1981 and has claimed over 40 million lives.
The virus originated in West Africa, jumping from a chimpanzee to humans in the early 1900s before spreading worldwide.
Tuberculosis existed in ancient Egypt, as evidenced by infected mummies from 3000-2400 BC.
During the 1700s and 1800s, people mistook the disease's family-wide spread for vampirism, believing the first victim drained life from relatives who later fell ill.
Malaria has shaped human history since ancient times.
Chinese medical texts documented its effects, and Egyptian mummies show evidence of the disease.
The disease became so widespread in Rome that people called it "Roman fever," possibly contributing to the empire's decline.
The first global cholera outbreak emerged from India in 1817.
The disease earned the name "blue death" in the 1800s when severe dehydration turned victims' skin bluish-gray.
Typhoid fever's documented history spans over two millennia, first appearing in ancient Greek medical texts.
The disease gained infamy through Mary Mallon, known as "Typhoid Mary," who infected 51 people while working as a cook in 1900s New York.
Though healthy herself, she spent 26 years in quarantine until her death in 1938.
Yellow fever emerged in the Americas during the 17th century slave trade and sparked deadly outbreaks across three continents.
Known as "Yellow Jack" in the 18th and 19th centuries, the disease devastated military campaigns in the tropics, crippling Napoleon's forces in Haiti and killing over 100,000 people along U.S. waterways.
Polio ravaged humanity for millennia, even showing up in ancient Egyptian art.
Yet it paradoxically became an epidemic only in the 1900s, when better sanitation reduced natural immunity.
During the 1950s crisis, parents turned to desperate measures—from throat-burning acids to radioactive necklaces.
The iron lung, a full-body breathing machine, emerged as the epidemic's defining image.
Scientists discovered Ebola in 1976 near its namesake river in modern-day Democratic Republic of Congo, though the virus likely circulated for millennia prior.
Fruit bats harbor and transmit the virus without illness, while it has decimated gorilla populations, with single outbreaks killing thousands.
Measles emerged from a cattle virus between 500-1200 AD, when human populations grew dense enough to sustain its spread.
Its first contact with unexposed populations proved catastrophic—in 1529, it killed two-thirds of Cuba's indigenous people who had survived smallpox.
Rabies was first documented in 1930 BC in Mesopotamia's Codex of Eshnunna, though evidence suggests knowledge of the disease existed a millennium earlier.
During the Renaissance and Early Modern period, people sought protection through "mad stones" — porous rocks believed to draw out rabies when pressed to bite wounds.
Ancient Greeks and Egyptians first documented tetanus, noting its distinct muscle spasms in wound infections.
Italian researchers confirmed its transmissibility in 1884 by successfully infecting rabbits with pus from human cases.
Though known since antiquity, diphtheria was first systematically described by Persian physician al-Razi in the 9th century.
Klebs and Loeffler later identified its bacterial cause in 1884.
A tragic incident in 1901, where contaminated antitoxin killed 10 of 11 children in St. Louis, sparked federal regulation of biological products in the United States.
Leprosy first appeared in Indian records in 2000 BC.
Norwegian scientist Gerhard Armauer Hansen discovered its bacterial cause in 1873.
Medieval European societies, driven by fear and misconception, believed the disease spread through mere sight or breath.
Communities forced infected individuals into complete isolation, sometimes performing mock funerals to mark their social death.
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