Before the coronavirus outbreak, various other contagious pandemics had happened in history and shook the whole world and killed millions of people from all around the globe. So let us take a brief look over these life-taking diseases, and dive into those eras so we can be prepared what's more to come in this very special year 2020.
(1) **Sixth Cholera (1911-1912)**
First on our list is sixth cholera. By the end of 1910 the sixth cholera pandemic was a major outbreak of cholera beginning in Haridwar Kumbh Mela in India, but this sixth time it's more powerful and deadly and took the lives of more than 8,00,000 people in the world. And spread to the Middle East, North Africa, Eastern Europe, and Russia.FUN FACT: At that time people drunk a lot of alcohol to prevent this disease. They thought that this is the only medicine, but they don't know that in the manufacturing of alcohol-water is believed that kills all the germs and viruses in it.
(2) **Hong Kong Flu (1968)**
The Hong Kong Flu, by its name it is obvious that it was originated in Hong Kong. This deadly flu spread all over the world by affecting millions and millions of people. It was a category 2 flu pandemic whose outbreak in 1968 and 1969 killed an estimated "one million" people all over the world. It was caused by an H3N2 strain of the influenza A virus, descended from H2N2 through antigenic shift, a genetic process in which genes from multiple sus reassorted to form a new virus.(3) **Asian Flu (1957)**
Asia is the heart of pandemic, in fact, this Coronavirus is also originated in Asia. This Asian Flu is famous for another name called “influenza”. An influenza pandemic is an epidemic of an influenza virus that spreads on a worldwide scale and infects a large proportion of the world population. In contrast to the regular seasonal epidemics of influenza, these pandemics occur irregularly – there have been five influenza pandemics during the last 140 years. Pandemics can cause high levels of mortality. Asian Flu pandemic caused so much dilemma and 50-70 million people were afflicted in which 2 million got killed.
(4) **Antonine (165AD)**
There exist a very long story about this plague. But we are talking about 165AD away before. So there's no such evidence about its cause, but we do know something about it.The Antonine Plague of 165 to 180 AD, also known as the Plague of Galen (from the name of the Greek physician living in the Roman Empire who described it), was an ancient pandemic brought to the Roman Empire by troops returning from campaigns in the Near East. Scholars have suspected it to have been either smallpox or measles, but the true cause remains undetermined. The epidemic may have claimed the life of a Roman emperor, Lucius Verus, who died in 169 C.E and was the co-regent of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, whose family name, Antoninus, has become associated with the epidemic. The disease broke out again nine years later, according to the Roman historian Dio Cassius (155–235), causing up to 2,000 deaths a day in Rome, one-quarter of those who were affected, giving the disease a mortality rate of about 25%. The total deaths have been estimated at 5 million, and the disease killed as much as one-third of the population in some areas and devastated the Roman army.
(5) **The Plague of Justinian (541-542AD)**
The Plague of Justinian was a pandemic that afflicted the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire and especially its capital, Constantinople, as well as the Sasanian Empire and port cities around the entire Mediterranean Sea, as merchant ships harbored rats that carried fleas infected with the plague. Some historians believe the plague of Justinian was one of the deadliest pandemics in history, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 25–100 million people during two centuries of recurrence, a death toll equivalent to as much as half of Europe's population at the time of the first outbreak. The plague's social and cultural impact has been compared to that of the Black Death that devastated Eurasia in the fourteenth century, but research published in 2019 argued that the plague's death toll and social effects have been exaggerated. In 2013, researchers confirmed earlier speculation that the cause of the Plague of Justinian was Yersinia pestis, the same bacterium responsible for the Black Death (1347–1351).
(6) **Spanish Flu (1918)**
Another Influenza plague, but this time it is way more deadly than the others. The Spanish flu (also known as the 1918 flu pandemic) was an unusually deadly influenza pandemic of virus strain H1N1. Lasting from January 1918 to December 1920, it infected 500 million people – about a quarter of the world's population at the time. Its first case was reported in the United States. The death toll is estimated to have been anywhere from 17 million to 50 million, and possibly as high as 100 million, afflicting 200-500 million people, making it one of the deadliest pandemics in human history.
Now, there comes the deadliest pandemics in human history ever recorded. It was so deadly that it almost wiped out approx 65% population at that time. It's almost impossible to imagine what could be the situation of the people at that time when it was terrorizing the globe.
(7) **The Black Death (1346-1353)**
The Black Death, also known as the Pestilence, the Great Bubonic Plague, the Great Plague or the Plague, or less commonly the Great Mortality or the Black Plague, was the most devastating pandemic recorded in human history, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 100 to 200 million people in Eurasia, peaking in Europe from 1347 to 1351. The bacterium Yersinia pestis, which results in several forms of plague (septicemic, pneumonic and, the most common, bubonic), is believed to have been the cause. The Black Death was the first major European outbreak of the plague and the second plague pandemic. The plague created several religious, social and economic upheavals, with profound effects on the course of European history.
We're very great full that we aren't born in that period, and also the Coronavirus isn't deadly like these mentioned above, but it can be, no one knows what's going to happen. It's already affected 1,192,619 people with 64,228 people who died (at the time of writing this article).
So, that's it for now. Until the next time, this is Science Feed saying goodbye to you all.