#1 Bubonic Plague:
Also known as “The Black Death,” getting infected used to be like being stopped by Death and asked to flip a coin. Heads you live, tails you die.
Death is pretty horrible, with parts of your body bubbling into large nodes, blood vomiting and your skin partially peeling off.
One sweep of this epidemic killed one out of three people in Europe. It’s that bad, and a faster form can kill you several hours after exposure.
Yet this disease was conquered by the invention of antibiotics. With the ever happening evolution and change, however, it is entirely possible that Black Death will develop resistance to the medications we have.
Death count: 200 million people total
#2 Tuberculosis (TB):
You don’t hear much about this disease, romantically named “The White Plague.” Which is downright mind-boggling.
Currently, 1/3 people in the entire world are infected with TB. It is the worst killer disease currently on the market, reaping several million deaths a year. One person is infected per second.
Thankfully, most cases don’t result in disease. That said, 10% do. Symptoms typically start off mild, then progress to a severe cough, extreme exhaustion and weight loss. Over time, TB eats away at your lungs, and you spit out blood.
Also known as “consumption,” because being infected is much like slowly being consumed alive.
Like its cousin The Black Death, TB can be treated by antibiotics. Doing so, however, can take up to six months, meaning that hardly anyone follows the treatment regime and progressively more resistant and nasty strains are emerging by the year.
Death count: 2 million annually
#3 Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome, AIDS:
We didn’t know that AIDS or the virus that causes it, HIV, existed thirty years ago.
Yet since then it has killed more than 20 million people. AIDS has almost caught up with Tuberculosis in terms of just how many million lives it takes a year, with one key difference: There is no permanent cure.
The symptoms of this disease are confusing and many.
They can range from weight loss and diarrhea, to railroad rings of fungus growing in your throat and tumorous blotches of red and blue spreading over your skin. In many cases, the disease reaches the brain and causes dementia.
By itself, AIDS reduced life expectancy in many African countries from 50 years to something like 25 years. So in parts of Africa, the coming of AIDS meant that the average person could expect to live half as long.
#4 Malaria:
Malaria is a heartbreaking disease. It kills 1-3 million people annually, and infects up to half a billion people per year.
Yet most of these cases occur in poor parts of the world. It is my belief that if malaria were endemic to wealthier parts, such as the USA, more effective treatments and even a vaccine might have been found already.
Until that happens, half a billion people annually can expect to suffer from vomiting, intense shivering, and even convulsions that occur cyclically every few days.
#5 Smallpox:
Smallpox is mostly a historical issue because it is the first disease we, together, eliminated from the world. And thank God we did.
Doing so was made easier by how nasty and vicious it is. Highly contagious, smallpox kills roughly 30% of those infects, and typically permanently scars those it doesn’t. That made it relatively easy to figure out where in the world it is.
#6 Heart Failure:
By one way or another, your heart stops working. Not exciting, not dramatic, not infectious or contagious. But it means this: you die.
Heart disease is by far the single worst killer of men and woman in the United States, easily outdoing cancer.
A lot of things cause heart failure, ranging from the quick and nasty – a heart attack – to the slow and insidious – high blood pressure, or high cholesterol.
#7 Schizophrenia:
What if I told you that you had a one in a hundred chance of waking up tomorrow and either hallucinating, becoming paranoid, or delusional?
Pretty scary. Yet some estimates put the prevalence of schizophrenia, a psychological disorder, at about that rate.
It’s hard to do justice to this condition, which takes away your most precious asset: your mind.
#8 Influenza:
A quiet disease that typically takes you out of commission for a week, but not much more. While it kills tens of thousands of people per year in the USA, that doesn’t make it one of the worst diseases ever.
What does is this: About once every 20-40 years, influenza mutates and a pandemic happens. That can turn the tens of thousands of deaths into tens of millions.
#9 Schistosomiasis:
Now this one I could almost bet you haven’t heard of.
Schistosomiasis is a condition where a worm crawls into your skin, takes up residence in your liver, and starts chewing, occasionally spitting out eggs that are covered in spikes.
#10 Typhus:
Another disease you don’t hear much about, but one that’s taken its share of millions.
Also known as “war fever,” Typhus is spread by fleas, and especially thrives in the crowded conditions of army barracks. It killed a large percentage of Napoleons army, and killed millions of soldiers in World War I.
SOURCE:GOOGLE.COM
