You Think Ebola Is Deadly? Then This Diseases Are Deadlier

Ebola is currently raging through West Africa at an unstoppable pace. Since March, when the first cases of the virus were reported, it has gone on to infect 6,553 people, of whom 3,083 are now dead.


It’s suspected that the disease can infect up to 1.4 million by January if health experts don’t figure out a way to control it.

The World Health Organization (WHO) says that the outbreak is “the largest and most complex Ebola outbreak since the Ebola virus was first discovered in 1976.

The outbreak is so bad that flights to the affected countries have been restricted, health experts are using experimental vaccines never before used on humans, and locals are rioting out of fear. Ebola strikes fear in people all around the world, and there’s no reason it wouldn’t.

It first appears as many other infections — with headaches, sore throats, and fevers and then quickly turns a person’s immune system against the body’s organs, causing blood vessels to explode, and internal and external bleeding.

With so much attention on the Ebola outbreak, it made us over here at Medical Daily wonder, what other diseases are so terrifyingly deadly? Here are four in no particular order.

The Black Death

Now known as the plague, this outbreak of disease was so deadly that classrooms across the U.S. still learn about it. It all began in 1347, when 12 Genoese trading ships returned from a journey through the Black Sea, according to History Channel.

Italians had long heard about a “Great Pestilence” hailing from the East (China, India, Persia, and Egypt), but by the time they learned it had arrived on their shores, it was too late. The rats and fleas carrying the disease, caused by the bacteria Yersinia pestis, had already left the boats and begun infecting Italians.

From Italy it spread to other parts of Europe, including Paris and London, through the air just as much as pests. Italian poet Giovanni Boccaccio described its most apparent symptom best, saying, “In men and women alike, at the beginning of the malady, certain swellings, either on the groin or under the armpits… waxed to the bigness of a common apple, others to the size of an egg, some more and some less, and these vulgar named plague-boils.”


Pus and blood would come out of these boils, and other symptoms like fever, headache, chills, and weakness would also emerge. Death came quick.
 
Unknowing of how to stop the disease medical science hadn’t advanced enough; one doctor thought it traveled through “the aerial spirit escaping from the eyes of the sick man” people began believing they were being punished by God for their sins.

Some groups lashed out at others (like Jews), killing thousands of people in an effort to “cleanse” the population. Others became part of a cultish group known as flagellants, who beat themselves and others with heavy, metal studded leather straps in public.

By the time the plague started to subside in the 1350s, about 60 percent of the European population had been killed, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). It still infects between 1,000 and 2,000 people each year, with 95 percent of cases in sub-Saharan Africa.

Smallpox

Quite possibly the worst disease known to man, according to CBS News, Smallpox killed about 500 million people between 1880 and 1980, when it became the first disease ever to be eradicated from Earth.

Before then, the virus, which is called either Variola major or Variola minor, had been around for at least 10,000 years, passing exclusively between humans through the air specifically through tiny drops of saliva.

From there, it caused a high fever and body aches, which led to the appearance of a rash (this was when they were most contagious), and then the most obvious sign, small, pus-filled boils.



These turned into scars if the person survived, but for the 30 percent who died, their deaths were met with the appearance of lesions in their eyes, mouths, and other bodily openings.

These lesions eventually blackened, peeled off, and emitted a strong odor now known as “smallpox smell.” CONTINUE READING

MEDICALDAILY