Pandemics

Agriculture

9500 BCE

When humans abandoned their nomadic lifestyles for having stationery civilizations, they started to live in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions. This lead to polluted water and food prepared near rotting corpes, rats and sewers. Also people and animals lived in close proximity to one another. Diseases spread around the villages but weren´t pandemics because they were isolated from one another.

Plague of Justinian

541

Byzantine Empire Caused by the yersinia pestis, or bubonic plague, this was the first major pandemic registered in history. It was spread through fleas carried by rats. Between 25 to 50 million people died in this pandemic, which was approximately 1/4 of Earth´s population.

Black Death

1347

Sicily
This was the name given to a disease that came from the ships that arrived to the port. The pandemic finished at the year 1351. During this time, Venetians banned saliors from entering their cities for 40 days. This was called "Quaranta Giorni", which is named today as "quarantine".
Nevertheless, it took between 100 and 200 million of lifes. This was 1/3 of global population.

European Diseases

1492

Smallpox and chicken pox were two diseases that affected Eurasia for centuries. They paved the way for Europeans to conquer America´s native people because of their lack of immunity.
Approximately over 90% of the pre-Colombian population died, almost 20 million of people.

Spanish Flu

1918

This disease hasn´t finished, although the strongest outbreak caused over 100 million deaths.

COVID-19

Dec 31, 2019

This virus was identified in the chinese city of Wuhan. Up to today it has left approximately 1.53 million deaths.