What is the worst pandemic in history?

Answer 1

The Spanish Influenza of 1918 to 1919 is said to have killed more than twenty million. Here are some blurbs and links.

http://virus.stanford.edu/uda/
"""The influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 killed more people than the Great War, known today as World War I (WWI), at somewhere between 20 and 40 million people. It has been cited as the most devastating epidemic in recorded world history. More people died of influenza in a single year than in four-years of the Black Death Bubonic Plague from 1347 to 1351. Known as "Spanish Flu" or "La Grippe" the influenza of 1918-1919 was a global disaster.


The Grim Reaper by Louis Raemaekers

In the fall of 1918 the Great War in Europe was winding down and peace was on the horizon. The Americans had joined in the fight, bringing the Allies closer to victory against the Germans. Deep within the trenches these men lived through some of the most brutal conditions of life, which it seemed could not be any worse. Then, in pockets across the globe, something erupted that seemed as benign as the common cold. The influenza of that season, however, was far more than a cold. In the two years that this scourge ravaged the earth, a fifth of the world's population was infected. The flu was most deadly for people ages 20 to 40. This pattern of morbidity was unusual for influenza which is usually a killer of the elderly and young children. It infected 28% of all Americans (Tice). An estimated 675,000 Americans died of influenza during the pandemic, ten times as many as in the world war. Of the U.S. soldiers who died in Europe, half of them fell to the influenza virus and not to the enemy (Deseret News). An estimated 43,000 servicemen mobilized for WWI died of influenza (Crosby). 1918 would go down as unforgettable year of suffering and death and yet of peace. As noted in the Journal of the American Medical Association final edition of 1918: """

http://www.vortex.is/sigrun/

http://www.haverford.edu/biology/edwards/disease/viral_essays/cummingsvirus.htm
"""Between the months of August and November of 1918, Spanish influenza spread quickly across the United States and around the world in epidemic proportions. The disease was thought to have been brought from country to country by sea-faring vessels passing through major port cities around the world, with illness striking men of French troops, the British Royal Navy, civilians in America, and more. The Public Health Service sanitation officer and member of the First Navy District, Dr. William M. Bryan, was aware of the conditions in Boston and was worried by them, where hot, dusty, and dry conditions exacerbated the problem, forcing sailors and soldiers into crowded conditions in Boston, where the close conditions and poor housing aided in the quick spread of influenza from person to person (23). Although influenza itself did not cause the deaths, but caused the pneumonia which did cause deaths, the number of deaths were still striking and rising. The deaths of three men in one afternoon in Quincy, Massachusetts caused the public to take notice. Bostonís church closed on September 22 to keep the public separated from each other (33). The disease proceeded to cause death in large numbers throughout the country. At one point, Philadelphia was stricken with 289 deaths within 24 hours(71).""

Ah Chooh

Peace....

Answer 2

THE BLACK DEATH, a pandemic of plague, probably both bubonic and pneumonic, the first onset of which ravaged Europe between 1347 and 1351, taking a proportionately greater toll of life than any other known epidemic or war up to that time.

Originating in China and Inner Asia, the plague was transmitted to Europeans (1347) when a Kipchak army, besieging a Genoese trading post in the Crimea, catapulted plague-infested corpses into the town. The disease spread from the Mediterranean ports affecting Sicily (1347); North Africa, mainland Italy, Spain, England, and France (1348); Austria, Hungary, Switzerland, Germany, and the Low Countries (1349); and Scandinavia and the Baltic lands (1350). There were recurrences of the plague in 1361-63, 1369-71, 1374-75, 1390, and 1400.

The rate of mortality from the Black Death varied from place to place: whereas some districts, such as the duchy of Milan, Flanders, and Béarn, seem to have escaped comparatively lightly, others, such as Tuscany, Aragon, Catalonia, and Languedoc, were very hard hit. Towns, where the danger of contagion was greater, were more affected than the countryside; and within the towns the monastic communities provided the highest incidence of victims. Even the great and powerful, who were more capable of flight, were struck down: among royalty, Eleanor, queen of Peter IV of Aragon, and King Alfonso XI of Castile succumbed, and Joan, daughter of the English king Edward III, died at Bordeaux on the way to her wedding with Alfonso's son. Canterbury lost two successive archbishops, John de Stratford and Thomas Bradwardine; Petrarch lost not only Laura, who inspired so many of his poems, but also his patron, Giovanni Cardinal Colonna. The papal court at Avignon was reduced by one-fourth. Whole communities and families were sometimes annihilated.

For more detail, see this URL:

Answer 3

The Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918 and 1918 was the deadliest outbreak of disease in recorded history. A pandemic describes an epidemic that spreads over a huge area or even becomes worldwide, which is what the Spanish Flu certainly did. The name Spanish Flu is misleading, indicating that the influenza outbreak began in Spain. In actuality, it is thought to have first struck in Fort Riley, Kansas, an Army base in the Midwest. The Spanish Flu killed so quickly that one story told of four women in the United States who got together one evening to play bridge. By the time the sun came up, three of them had died from the Spanish Flu.

Spain was particularly hard hit by the influenza virus, hence the name given the disease. One of the few countries in Europe not involved in World War I, Spain did not censor what was happening with the mortality rate of this dreaded condition, and by some accounts it killed eight million people there in short order. It is estimated that the Spanish Flu killed at least fifty million people around the globe, with some experts placing the number as high as one hundred million deaths attributable to the ailment. This means that a full five percent of the entire world's population was wiped out by the Spanish flu. Twenty percent of all the humans on the globe contracted the disease, and it is thought to have been responsible for twenty-five million fatalities in its first twenty-five weeks. The Spanish Flu of 1918-1919 took from half a million to three quarters of a million lives in the United States alone.

Britain lost two hundred thousand souls to the Spanish Flu, while France more than twice that number. Even in Australia there were ten thousand dead from the Spanish Flu. The reason it was able to spread so far and so fast was World War I. Soldiers from the many armies fighting in this great conflict carried the Spanish Flu with them. The strain of virus that was responsible is thought to have first come into existence in China or Tibet and made its way out of that region. The disease was believed to have passed from birds to humans in viral form, not unlike the present bird flu that is being talked about today. As soldiers made their way across the globe and then back to their communities, the Spanish Flu went with them. The close quarters these soldiers shared contributed to its spread, and their immune systems were already compromised by the stress and trials of the long war. India lost as many as twenty million people to the disease, with almost a quarter of the Indian army perishing from the disease. Over half of the American deaths in World War I were from the effects of the Spanish Flu. In October of 1918 alone, two hundred thousand citizens died from the condition in the US.

Answer 4

Sorry to disagree with all others but this is the WORST pandemic

The Black Death, or Black Plague, was one of the most devastating pandemics in human history. It began in south-western Asia and spread to Europe by the late 1340s. The total number of deaths worldwide from the pandemic is estimated at 75 million people, there was an estimated 20 million deaths in Europe alone. The Black Death is estimated to have killed between a third and two-thirds of Europe's population.[1][2]

The same disease is thought to have returned to Europe every generation with varying degrees of intensity and fatality until the 1700s. Notable later outbreaks include the Italian Plague of 1629-1631, the Great Plague of London (1665–1666), the Great Plague of Vienna (1679), the Great Plague of Marseille in 1720–1722 and the 1771 plague in Moscow. There is some controversy over the identity of the disease, but in its virulent form it seems to have disappeared from Europe in the 18th century.

The Black Death had a drastic effect on Europe's population, irrevocably changing Europe's social structure. It was a serious blow to the Roman Catholic Church, Europe's predominant religious institution at the time, and resulted in widespread persecution of minorities such as Jews, Muslims, foreigners, beggars and lepers. The uncertainty of daily survival created a general mood of morbidity influencing people to "live for the moment", as illustrated by Giovanni Boccaccio in The Decameron (1353).

The initial fourteenth-century European event was called the 'Great Mortality' by contemporary writers and, with later outbreaks, became known as the 'Black Death'. It has been popularly thought that the name came from a striking symptom of the disease, called acral necrosis, in which the sufferers' skin would blacken due to subdermal hemorrhages. However, the term refers in fact to the figurative sense of 'black' (glum, lugubrious or dreadful).[3]

Because the Black Death was, according to historical accounts, characterised by buboes (swellings in lymph nodes), like the late 19th century Asian Bubonic plague, scientists and historians assumed at the beginning of the twentieth century that the Black Death was an outbreak of the same disease, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis and spread by fleas with the help of animals like the black rat (Rattus rattus). However, buboes are a feature of other diseases as well and this view is now questioned. (Viki)

Answer 5

I would say the Influenza of 1918-1919 too,
even tho the plague was pretty noteworthy, it wasn;t a true pandemic and it killed over a much longer period of time.

Answer 6

i'd ought to placed the Holocaust close to the main appropriate of that checklist. Hiroshima and Nagasaki ought to be suggested. the yank civil conflict, the Indian wars. Jim Crow. The crusades, the inquisitions. Carrot maximum appropriate's occupation. it is a protracted checklist, no longer uncomplicated to % what became worst.

Answer 7

The 1919 spanish flu epidemic killed nearly 50 million people in less than a year......

Answer 8

well everyone has their own opnion....even though that one killed alot of people, there was more pain involved in this one....just an example my friend used...anyway here is a website...enjoyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemic

Answer 9

The Black Plague in the middle ages. alternately known as the Black Death.