[TOP 5] #2 The biggest epidemics of mankind

The smallpox epidemic was recorded in history as the one that facilitated the conquest of Europeans to Europeans. As a biological weapon it was used deliberately. Its blankets were blankets and handkerchiefs that, after being used by infected people, were tossed to Indians attacking colonizers near Fort Pitt, Pennsylvania. The plague of American colonies and Europe was stopped by the new invention - vaccinations, used at the beginning of the 18th century in Boston by Cotton Moth and perfected at the end of the same century by Edward Jenner. Before vaccination eliminated the threat, about 60 million people died in Europe in the 18th century due to smallpox.

In the area of today's Mexico lived up to 25 million Indians. The invasion of Europeans meant not only a military defeat for them, but above all a contact with new, unknown diseases such as smallpox, measles and typhus. During the century, the Indian population in this area decreased by 60 - 90 percent. In the account of 1576, the Franciscan Juan de Torquemada wrote that the entire country was almost completely depopulated.

Globalization is not an invention of recent years. When in the mid-fourteenth century in Asia - perhaps in China - the plague epidemic broke out, the plague quickly, along with the merchants wandering the Silk Road, reached Europe. Her first outbreaks appeared in the Crimea, where during one of the sieges, the Mongols used contaminated corpses as biological weapons. The Genoese merchants fleeing from the swamp of Kaffa dragged the plague into Sicily and the Apennine Peninsula, from where it spread throughout Europe. All except Poland. The plague also affected Asia, the Middle East and parts of Africa. Data on the number of deaths are divergent and their upper limit reaches 200 million. It is estimated that about half of the European population died in four years - the continent needed a century and a half to rise after this disaster.

Soon after the fall of the Roman Empire, humanity experienced another disaster. In the Byzantine Empire, a deadly harvest began to gather a pandemic known as Justynian plague, which encompassed the majority of the civilized world. The plague probably began in Ethiopia or Egypt and reached Byzantium with grain transports. The plague port city, probably a bubonic plague, was of such a scale that there was no place for burial. In Constantinople alone, five thousand per day died. people (!), and the scale of deaths forced the introduction of a new, simpler inheritance law. It is estimated that the epidemic has claimed up to 100 million people, including about 50-60 percent. Europeans, who died in the years 541 and 542.

Half of the fifth century. Two contemporary powers - Athena and Sparta - fought together in today's Greece. But it was not the war that decimated both armies. In the port of Piraeus, which is the window of Athens, the plague began, described, among others, by an ancient historian, Thucydides. An epidemic - probably - of typhoid fever caused the death of one-third of the town's inhabitants and every fourth Athenian soldier within four years. Its victim was also one of the leading Athenian leaders, Pericles.