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A look back at the deadliest pandemics in the world, from antiquity to the present day.
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On January 30, 2020, the World Health Organization qualified the coronavirus epidemic as a “public health emergency of international concern.” Very quickly, this virus that appeared in the city of Wuhan in China spread around the world. This is then referred to as a pandemic, as it is an “epidemic spread across the entire population of a continent, or even the whole world”.
A look back at the deadliest pandemics in the world, from antiquity to the present day.
In the summer of 430 BC, a disease spread rapidly within the city of Athens. It was described as completely unprecedented by Thucydides, who reported the facts in the Book II of his History of the Peloponnesian War. Clinical manifestations included severe headaches, violent coughing, blisters and ulcers, and extreme fatigue. The chronicler reported that even scavengers did not approach the corpses. If they did, they died.
Several medical interpretations were given. Based on Thucydides' writings, nearly 15 diagnoses were proposed by scholars: typhus, smallpox, measles, typhoid fever or Ebola fever... Others attest that it was not one disease but several, making up a set of diverse but no less fierce syndromes.
There were two epidemic waves, the first from 430 to 428 and the second from 428 to 426, devastating the Athenians. Some historians estimate that there were nearly 200,000 victims of this epidemic, potentially born in Ethiopia and passed through Egypt and Libya before reaching Greece.
We are in the Middle Ages this time, around 1346, when a plague pandemic hit Eurasia and Africa. This disease, arriving from China via the Silk Road, spread at a frenetic pace and caused significant demographic, socio-economic, and religious damage. The German doctor and writer Justus Hecker (1795-1850) described this pandemic as a true factor of transformation of medieval society.
Europe had no choice but to implement new health regulations. Several cities banned the entry of travelers, locked down completely, and implemented quarantines until 1352.
Historians estimate that nearly 40% of the European population succumbed to the disease, or between 30 and 45 million people, a figure that rises to nearly 200,000 deaths worldwide.
There were many cholera epidemics. Several affected France, particularly between 1829 and 1837, 1840 and 1860, 1863 and 1875. This disease, coming from Asia via Russia, devastated the populations of the 19th century.
Severe diarrhea, vomiting, dehydration, the corpses piled up in record time. Population movements increased the spread of the disease, which killed over a million people worldwide.
Even today, the disease strikes countries where sanitary conditions favor its spread.
Source: https://www.biusante.parisdescartes.fr/histmed/image?CISB0631
Another scourge of World War I, this epidemic killed between 50 and 100 million people between 1918 and 1919. Possibly arriving first in the United States, it is nicknamed the “Spanish Flu” because it was particularly virulent and deadly in Spain.
This flu is extremely contagious, and fever and bacterial superinfections kill quickly, within about ten days.
It is said that this flu gradually diluted into the “mild” flu and that it mutated over time to become more deadly.
To learn more, check out our article 70+ resources on epidemics that marked history.