The 5 Worst Plagues In Human History | Random Thursday

don't call it a comeback I've had glasses for years okay so in 1938 Orson Welles shocked the nation with his radio play War of the Worlds radio for all you whippersnappers out there was a type of live entertainment that didn't have images it only had sound it was kind of like a podcast over the air it was a whole thing anyway in this radio drama it was presented sort of like a news broadcast and it tricked a lot of people into thinking that we were actually being invaded by an alien species a plague of aliens if you will it scared people so much that there were reports of people flooding police stations begging for gas masks in order to save them apparently the the highways out of New Jersey were completely jammed up with people trying to escape and somewhere in Nebraska apparently a woman ran into a church and yelled the end of the world is here go home and be with your families Orson Welles the original troll luckily they didn't have any reason to fear because in War of the Worlds spoiler alert the aliens were killed off by our microbes which not to go on a tangent that's always bugged me because how did these super advanced aliens not know about microbes we figured that about a hundred years ago oh my god don't get me started on the movie signs an alien race the hyper intelligence so much further beyond where we are can travel all the way across the galaxy to land on a planet that's 80 percent water when their only weakness is water come on Shamu man anyway while microbes are apparently our only defense against killer aliens that can also be our biggest enemy on Monday I did a video about overpopulation and whether or not fan OHS from Avengers infinity war was right in what he wanted to do and in it I talked about the Black Death and how that's one of the only times in human history where a population actually went down worldwide but that was not the only plague in history in fact some were even worse [Music] just like in War of the Worlds the most potent killer on earth are our smallest organisms might be the only thing that movie got right so this video is about the top five plagues in human history and it got a little bit complicated to put this list together because there are some diseases that have wiped out tons of people throughout history but never in one time and then there were other diseases that only popped up once but wiped out a big percentage of the world in the process and then there are some that popped up over and over again in plagues in various places throughout the world so I try to kind of shoot the needle on this one and do a little bit of both tell me what you think number five HIV HIV stands for the human immunodeficiency virus and a lot of times this gets confused with AIDS HIV and AIDS are sort of related but AIDS is actually more of a collection of symptoms that you get from hiv/aids standing for acquired immune deficiency syndrome and what sets this worldwide plague apart from all the others on our list is it's still happening right now AIDS was first identified in 1981 although the origination of the disease went back a decade or two before that and since then it's killed nearly 35 million people around the world HIV is just a bastard of a virus that does all kinds of weird things it first hits you almost like the flu you get it after you've been exposed a couple of weeks afterwards you get flu-like symptoms that just kind of passes most people don't think anything of it some people don't get any symptoms at all but it's the second stage of HIV that makes it especially awful because it's completely asymptomatic you carry HIV for it anywhere from 10 to 15 years with no symptoms whatsoever and most people don't even know it but what's going on underneath is it slowly attacking the immune system taking it down piece by piece by piece for a long period of time until eventually you hit stage 3 and stage 3 is when your immune system is just so vulnerable and weakened because of years and years of attacks underneath the surface that you basically are prone to any kind of crazy infection they call them opportunistic infections people in this stage experience extreme weight loss they have chronic coughing that doesn't ever go away they have lung infections skin infections pop up quite a bit sometimes tuberculosis can break out and this is what we call it's full-blown AIDS and eventually it's one of those opportunistic infections that actually kills the person now one of the real tragedies about HIV is that because it was sexually transmitted and because it was mostly in the gay community in the early days it wasn't really paid enough attention to until it really got out of control eventually a string of high-profile celebrity cases popped up like Rock Hudson Freddie Mercury and Anthony Perkins these people all died and brought a lot of attention to it and then there are these tragic stories of people who acquired it from getting a blood transfusion because they didn't test for these things in the early days people like Ryan white Arthur Ashe and Isaac Asimov even died of this the arrival of eight set up a total panic around sex safe sex the word safe sex became a household term and of course this happened right about the time that I was finally old enough to have sex and sex became basically Russian roulette it really did affect my entire generation and the way we looked at promiscuity and intimate relationships now luckily today HIV isn't the immediate dissonance that it used to be there's certain cocktail of drugs that you can take or various different combinations of drugs that can usually keep it under control and you can live a relatively long life regular screenings and sex education has helped to manage the disease in most of the world but it remains a problem in Africa we're over thirty six point seven million people currently have the disease so unfortunately this is still very much a plague we're right in the middle of number four malaria I hate mosquitoes well there's never been a specific plague of malaria that we can point to this one makes the list just off of sheer numbers in 2015 more than two hundred and twelve million people contracted malaria and that's actually down 29% from 2010 but thanks to modern medicine only about half a million died that's still a lot but a lot less than 212 million but before modern medicine it was not a good time someone actually estimated that malaria has killed off half of all people who have ever lived that's a pretty hard claim to verify but it is very prevalent in places where we kind of evolved out of in the early days of our species in fact the bacteria that causes malaria was found in a mist Kito that was trapped in amber over 30 million years ago yeah just like Jurassic Park they found dinosaur blood and malaria malaria is of course spread by mosquitoes more specifically the species Anopheles and even more specifically only the female of the species now it's actually not caused by a bacteria or virus it's actually caused by a single-cell organism called a Plasmodium that multiplies inside of our red blood cells and because this is transmitted by mosquitoes this is what's known as a vector borne illness so if you're unlucky enough to have the wrong mosquito bite you and about a week or so you can experience things like severe abdominal pain nausea diarrhea and vomiting you know all those nice little nasties you can also get extreme fatigue and low blood pressure that can actually cause you to faint say if you stand up or move too fast this is all from the anemia that you sets in after having all this red blood cells taken out of your system this anemia weakens the body weakens the immune system makes you prone to infections and can cause blood clots that can form in your brain which as I'm sure you can imagine not good so if you ever traveling in tropical areas like Africa Central or South America or the Middle East and start to come down with some of these symptoms see a doctor immediately so while billions have been poured into fighting this disease from foundations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and a lot of progress has been made in terms of helping people to survive it it still remains a threat to nearly half of the people on the planet that live in these areas and for now anyway there's no vaccine there's a mosquito in here right now number three bubonic plague this is what everybody thinks of when you say the word plague I mean it's right there in the name it's a bacterium called your Sina pestis that's actually transmitted by fleas Angie I wonder why they called it pestis this is the disease that caused the black death but it also popped up various times throughout history all the way up into the 20th century the first recorded instance of this plague was the plague of Justinian in the year 541 to 540 - this killed 25 million people and then 50 million after recurrences that popped up in the centuries following that it wound up wiping out 13% of the entire world population so one of my little pet peeves is when people use the word decimate the wrong way people say they think god decimate it is just wiped out everything but the word decimated actually means to reduce by 10% so in the case of the plague of Justinian yeah it literally decimated the planet the black death occurred between 1347 and 13:51 it only lasted four years but it killed nearly 200 million people or 30 to 60% of the population of Europe I could do and many have done an entire video on the Black Death it's absolutely fascinating and it changed the world in ways that we're still feeling today the Plague of London occurred between 1665 and 1666 and while it was contained just in London it killed a quarter of the population so just imagine one out of every four people you know just dying in one year and the third plague pandemic hit in 1855 in China and India and it lasted up until wait for it 1959 and in the process that killed over 12 million people now if you got the bubonic plague well the first things you would notice aside from feeling sick is that your lymph nodes would swell up to the size of chicken eggs these are known as buboes hence the name bubonic and from there things get really fun because then your skin breaks out in fluid-filled cysts and boils all over your body and your extremities like your fingers turn black from necrosis this hence the word black and black death and then after a few days you die it's the word death the black death left an indelible mark on Europe everything from religious upheavals to increases in innovation in productivity because there were fewer people to do the work they had to get creative and use machinery to find ways to do the work that used to be done by a whole bunch of people luckily the bubonic plague is all but wiped out today with fewer than 200 cases a year popping up randomly around the world and those are actually treated with strong antibiotics so deaths from bubonic plague is actually quite rare number two the Spanish flu of 1918 so the influenza virus chances are you've had it we've all had it at some point in our lives it's so common that there's a flu season every year and it's not uncommon for people to die from the flu usually it's older people or younger people or people with compromised immune systems but the flu pandemic of 1918 that was a whole different animal this particular strain of flu found its way around the world infected 500 million people killing over a hundred million people in one year this is considered one of the worst disasters in human history but the reason you might not have heard much about it is because it took place during World War one one of the other biggest disasters in human history yeah 1918 not a great year now it's not actually known where this originated from it's called the Spanish flu so a lot of people think that it came from Spain but the reason it was called Spanish flu was because again World War one was going on and the news reporters and organizations didn't want to lower morale by talking about this horrible flu that was going around so it kind of got censored in most of the reporting from around the world but Spain which was neutral in World War one reported on it quite a bit so therefore it looked like Spain was hardest hit by it but it was actually not any more hit than anybody else unluckily for them that the name stuck but the weird thing about this particular strain of flu is like I said before most flus kill older or younger people immunocompromised people this one actually mostly killed healthy young people and it's thought because it was it caused a cytokine storm in your immune system so if you had a strong immune system it actually turned that immune system against your body so the stronger your immune system the more likely it was to kill you now this is sometimes called The Forgotten pandemic because it again took place during World War one that's where everybody's attention was focused but in terms of sheer numbers the number of people that killed in such a short amount of time is absolutely mind-blowing it killed more people in a shorter amount of time than any other disease in human history and number one smallpox smallpox saw smallpox is caused by the variola virus and it's been around really since the beginning of our species and it's just been killing the [ __ ] out of people all the way through it is killed estimated over 500 million people if you get smallpox there's a one in three chance that you're gonna die one of the first recorded plays with the plague of Athens and 430 BC and this was thought to be caused by the smallpox virus it's also thought to be responsible for the Antonine plague during 165 to 180 ad which killed over 7 million people a ravaged Europe all the way up into the second millennium but it was when Europeans landed in the Americas it really got its groove on in the centuries after Europeans landed in the Americas nearly 90% of Native American populations were wiped out by not only smallpox but typhoid and cholera and tuberculosis as well by the way I'm gonna link to a video right here that CGP grey did where he talked about why the plague only went from Europe to the Americas and not the other way around it's actually really fascinating so victims of smallpox would start things off with fever and headaches and sweating and a rash that eventually turns into pustules all over your body these pustules managed to do a couple of things one is spread it to other people very easily and open up your body to infections that came in and wiped you out this is an old thing we talked about this already although apparently there was a type of smallpox called sledgehammer smallpox that just caused you to bleed out of all of your sores pretty and it wasn't just poor peasants that were affected in the 17th and 18th centuries it killed several reigning European monarchs including the Habsburg Emperor Joseph one queen mary ii of england tsar peter ii of russia and king Louis the fifteenth of France as well as Neath the Opium King a Chinese emperor in two Japanese Emperor's turns out no one was immune to smallpox except milkmaids in 1796 while smallpox was literally killing off 20% of the European population a physician named Edward Jenner noticed that milkmaids who had come down with cow pox which is a much milder form of pox were immune to smallpox and he wondered why so we had this theory that if you could infect somebody with cow pox they would be inoculated against smallpox so he tested this out on his gardeners son he got some pustule pus from a milkmaid that had cow pox and injected it into his arm and gave him a little bit of kal pox he had a very trusting gardener of course he had to test whether or not the kid was immune to smallpox after the cow pox worked through his system so he took this kid and exposed him to smallpox over and over again who was this gardener but luckily for the world and especially for that kid it worked he didn't get smallpox and it proved that getting cow pox could inoculate you against smallpox so he named it a vaccination baka actually is the Italian word for cow so once this was proven to work countries around the world began to mandate smallpox vaccinations to their populations and it eventually completely wiped out the disease in 1980 it was declared officially eradicated by the UN so thanks to technology and vaccinations the worst killer in all of human history has been contained go science now there's actually a debate going on today because smallpox only exists in two labs around the world one in Atlanta and one in Moscow and there are people debating whether or not we should kill those samples and just completely get rid of it all together while others say maybe we should hang on to it so that we can test it and be able to deal with it should smallpox ever come back but then there's always that worry that it could be weaponized it wouldn't be the first time smallpox was used against populations to kill them up it was certainly done in the Americas but how ironic is it that we're talking about weaponizing smallpox which is exactly how we wiped out the aliens and more of the world's how's that for wrapping things up in a bow anyway fascinating stuff I'll put some links down in the description for you to go check out and learn more about this be glad you live when you do people hey if you like my shirt and you like the channel and you want to represent out on the street we have these available on my website on the store answers with joke on select shirts there's this and all kinds of fun and nerdy geeky t-shirts that i wear out in public and good comments on them all the time so i think you will too go check it out answers our joke on sweatshirts please like and share this video if you liked it and if it's your first time here please check out some of my other videos you might like those too and you do it subscribe you'll be one of the first people to see them when they come out every Monday and Thursday with that I bid you adieu thank you so much for watching you guys go out have an eye-opening rest of the week and I'll see you on Monday hope you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 900,121

Rating: 4.9136581 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, random thursday, worst plagues in history, top 5, bubonic plague, black death, AIDS, HIV, smallpox, CGP Grey, malaria, plague of athens, justinian plague, great plague of london, vaccinations, edward jenner, spanish flu, the great flu pandemic of 1918, war of the worlds, orson welles

Id: 5fdYx3d4v28

Length: 16min 57sec (1017 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 06 2018