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Asked by Pespona to Sally, Marikka on 10 Nov 2014.
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Marikka Beecroft answered on 10 Nov 2014:
The most dangerous epidemic that I am aware of was the bubonic plague or black death in the medieval times. It killed at least one third of Europe’s population: so to put it into perspective it killed 50 million people. Also if you think about it as well they didn’t know about germs back then, so didn’t know how it spread, how to treat it or what it really was. So in my mind it was the most dangerous as it was lethal and no one knew how to fight it.
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Sally Cutler answered on 10 Nov 2014:
I think we have had many and to rank them as to which was the most dangerous is difficult. You can try to do this my looking at a measure of how many individuals one infected person will infect, so respiratory infections socre highly here. Other global epidemics were louse-borne as in conditions of poverty, lice spread really quickly from person to person. Epidemic typhus killed most of the Napoleonic great armies, and louse-borne relapsing fever wiped out about a third of the African population. Spanish flu just after the war also made a big impact.
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