Disease
SARS Pandemic: How the Virus Spread Around the World in 2003
In November 2002, doctors in the Guangdong province of southeastern China began to see the first cases of what would become known as SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome. Over the next several months, 8,096 people in 26 countries contracted the new viral illness, leading to ...read more
How Measles Helped Destroy the Hawaiian Monarchy
London’s St. Martin-in-the-Fields church was home to the graves of plenty of English noblemen, but it had never seen a pair of graves quite like this. They belonged to Kamehameha II and his queen, Kamamalu, and they were just temporary resting places. It was July 1824, and soon, ...read more
Life in the Trenches of World War I
When Union Army general William Tecumseh Sherman famously said “War is hell,” he was referring to war in general, but he could have been describing trench warfare, a military tactic that’s been traced to the Civil War. Trenches—long, deep ditches dug as protective defenses—are ...read more
Rats Didn’t Spread the Black Death—It Was Humans
Rats have long been blamed for spreading the Black Death around Europe in the 14th century. Specifically, historians have speculated that the fleas on rats are responsible for the estimated 25 million plague deaths between 1347 and 1351. However, a new study suggests that rats ...read more
What Caused the Aztec Empire to Fall? Scientists Uncover New Clues
In 1545, an unknown disease struck the Aztec Empire. Those who came down with it might become feverish, start vomiting, and develop blotches on their skin. Most horrific of all, they’d bleed from their eyes, mouth, and nose, then die within a few days. Over the next five years, ...read more
History of AIDS
In the 1980s and early 1990s, the outbreak of HIV and AIDS swept across the United States and rest of the world, though the disease originated decades earlier. Today, more than 70 million people have been infected with HIV and about 35 million have died from AIDS since the start ...read more
6 Devastating Plagues
1. The Plague of Justinian Justinian I is often credited as the most influential Byzantine emperor, but his reign also coincided with one of the first well-documented outbreaks of plague. The pandemic is believed to have originated in Africa and then spread to Europe through ...read more
Remembering the Legionnaires’ Outbreak
In the midst of a star-spangled summer in which the United States celebrated its bicentennial, more than 4,000 members of the Pennsylvania chapter of the American Legion gathered just blocks away from Independence Hall where the country’s forefathers had severed their ties with ...read more
The Rise and Fall of Smallpox
Smallpox is believed to have first infected humans around the time of the earliest agricultural settlements some 12,000 years ago. No surviving evidence of it, however, predates the so-called New Kingdom of Egypt, which lasted from about 1570 B.C. to 1085 B.C. A few mummies from ...read more
10 Things You May Not Know About 'Typhoid Mary'
1. Typhoid Mary's real name was Mary Mallon. She was born on September 23, 1869, in Cookstown, a small village in the north of Ireland. Mallon’s hometown in County Tyrone was among one of Ireland’s poorest areas. 2. Only three confirmed deaths were linked to Typhoid Mary. ...read more
8 Things You May Not Know About Jonas Salk and the Polio Vaccine
1. Although polio was the most feared disease of the 20th century, it was hardly the deadliest. “Polio was never the raging epidemic portrayed in the media, not even at its height in the 1940s and 1950s,” writes David M. Oshinsky in his Pulitzer Prize winning book “Polio: An ...read more
China Epicenter of 1918 Flu Pandemic, Historian Says
For most of the past century, scientists and medical researchers have hotly debated the origins of the 1918 influenza outbreak. Although the pandemic had been dubbed the “Spanish flu,” it only appeared to hit harder in neutral Spain because the country was free from wartime ...read more
When Early Humans Left Africa, Tuberculosis Traveled With Them
During the 18th and 19th centuries, in the swiftly industrializing countries of Europe and North America, tuberculosis–or the dreaded “consumption”–reached epic proportions. It was the leading cause of death among all age groups in the Western world until the early 20th century, ...read more
Black Death
The Black Death was a devastating global epidemic of bubonic plague that struck Europe and Asia in the mid-1300s. The plague arrived in Europe in October 1347, when 12 ships from the Black Sea docked at the Sicilian port of Messina. People gathered on the docks were met with a ...read more
World Health Organization declares SARS contained worldwide
On July 5, 2003, the World Health Organization (WHO) announces that all person-to-person transmission of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) has ceased. In the previous eight months, the disease had killed about 775 people in 29 countries and exposed the dangers of ...read more
Penicillin discovered
Sir Alexander Fleming was a young bacteriologist when an accidental discovery led to one of the great developments of modern medicine on September 3, 1928. Having left a plate of staphylococcus bacteria uncovered, Fleming noticed that a mold that had fallen on the culture had ...read more
Early smallpox vaccine is tested
Edward Jenner, an English country doctor from Gloucestershire, administers the world’s first vaccination as a preventive treatment for smallpox, a disease that had killed millions of people over the centuries. While still a medical student, Jenner noticed that milkmaids who had ...read more
Children receive first polio vaccine
On February 23, 1954, a group of children from Arsenal Elementary School in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, receive the first injections of the new polio vaccine developed by Dr. Jonas Salk. Though not as devastating as the plague or influenza, poliomyelitis was a highly contagious ...read more
Polio vaccine trials begin
On April 26, 1954, the Salk polio vaccine field trials, involving 1.8 million children, begin at the Franklin Sherman Elementary School in McLean, Virginia. Children in the United States, Canada and Finland participated in the trials, which used for the first time the ...read more
Magic Johnson announces he is HIV-positive
On November 7, 1991, basketball legend Earvin “Magic” Johnson stuns the world by announcing his sudden retirement from the Los Angeles Lakers, after testing positive for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. At the time, many Americans viewed AIDS as solely a gay white man’s disease. ...read more
Hollywood icon Rock Hudson dies of AIDS
On October 2, 1985, actor Rock Hudson, 59, becomes the first major U.S. celebrity to die of complications from AIDS. Hudson’s death raised public awareness of the epidemic, which until that time had been ignored by many in the mainstream as a “gay plague.” Hudson, born Leroy ...read more
Rock Hudson announces he has AIDS
On July 25, 1985, Rock Hudson, a quintessential tall, dark and handsome Hollywood leading man of the 1950s and 1960s who made more than 60 films during his career, announces through a press release that he is suffering from acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). With that ...read more
“Philadelphia,” the first major Hollywood movie about AIDS, opens in theaters
On December 23, 1993, Philadelphia, starring the actor Tom Hanks in the first major Hollywood movie to focus on the subject of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), opens in theaters. In the film, Hanks played Andrew Beckett, a gay attorney who is unjustly fired from his ...read more
New York City reports first cases of West Nile virus
The first cases of an encephalitis outbreak are reported in New York City on August 23, 1999. Seven people die from what turns out to be the first cases of West Nile virus in the United States. A cluster of eight cases of St. Louis encephalitis was diagnosed among patients in the ...read more