So far, only two diseases have been successfully eradicated—one specifically affecting humans (smallpox) and one affecting cattle (rinderpest).
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has since then declared only two viruses to have been officially eradicated thus far; variola virus (VARV), which causes smallpox, and rinderpest virus (RPV), which causes rinderpest (also known as cattle plague).
Vaccination has made an enormous contribution to global health. Two major infections, smallpox and rinderpest, have been eradicated.
Scarlet fever, tuberculosis, mumps, measles: You may think these are deadly diseases of the past, wiped out with vaccines and antibiotics. The truth is that these diseases are still infecting people worldwide, and some have made resurgences in the U.S. Stay healthy and safe with the precautions outlined here.
The oldest contagious disease known to affect humans is tuberculosis, a respiratory disease caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis. The bacterium is thought to have existed in something similar to its modern form for more than 70,000 years, and has been infecting humans since early prehistory.
Old World diseases that were not present in the Americas until contact include bubonic plague, measles, smallpox, mumps, chickenpox, influenza, cholera, diphtheria, typhus, malaria, leprosy, and yellow fever.
Communicable diseases existed during humankind's hunter-gatherer era, but the shift to agrarian life 10,000 years ago created larger communities where epidemics thrived and became more fatal. Malaria, tuberculosis, leprosy, influenza, smallpox and others first appeared several millennia ago.
dementia, including Alzheimer's disease. advanced lung, heart, kidney and liver disease. stroke and other neurological diseases, including motor neurone disease and multiple sclerosis. Huntington's disease.
PopSci Deadly viral pathogens include rabies, which is fatal without swift treatment, and the flu, which has a huge global toll. Over the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, the coronavirus directly or indirectly killed about 15 million people worldwide, according to estimates from the World Health Organization.
Co-ordinated attempt. While the vaccination may have helped to save lives, better public health measures also played a crucial role in containing the outbreak. Treatment centres and isolation zones were set up to reduce the spread of the virus and face-masks, gowns and gloves were used.
The illness spread to more than two dozen countries in North America, South America, Europe, and Asia before the SARS global outbreak of 2003 was contained. Since 2004, there have not been any known cases of SARS reported anywhere in the world.
A disease may be caused by external factors such as pathogens or by internal dysfunctions. For example, internal dysfunctions of the immune system can produce a variety of different diseases, including various forms of immunodeficiency, hypersensitivity, allergies, and autoimmune disorders.
Across Earth's history, our planet has been home to an estimated 109 billion human beings. And according to another oft-repeated factoid, half of all the people who have ever existed were killed by malaria, the worst mosquito-borne illness.
Europeans brought deadly viruses and bacteria, such as smallpox, measles, typhus, and cholera, for which Native Americans had no immunity (Denevan, 1976).
These are: tuberculosis (or TB), leprosy, cholera, smallpox, rabies, malaria, pneumonia, trachoma (chronic infection of the eyelid), influenza, measles and the black plaque.
Historically, exanthems were numbered in the order in which they were first differentiated from other exanthems. Thus, "first" disease was measles (rubeola), "second" disease was scarlet fever, and "third" disease was rubella (German measles).
However, the most important infectious diseases of modern food-producing human populations also include diseases that could have emerged only within the past 11,000 years, following the rise of agriculture (Diamond, 1997; Dobson and Carper, 1996).
Although many human infections only developed after human settlements and animal domistication, early human ancestors would still have been fighting off bacteria and other nasty diseases. Some of these diseases are still around today.
A rare disease is generally considered to be a disease that affects fewer than 200,000 people in the United States at any given time.
RPI Deficiency
This is considered to be the rarest disease in the world. Ribose-5-Phosphate Isomerase (RPI), is a crucial enzyme in a metabolic process in the human body. This condition can cause muscle stiffness, seizures, and reduction of white matter in the brain.
In the United States, a rare disease is one that fewer than 200,000 people live with. (In other words, 60 per 100,000 individuals.)