Devastating Diseases: Going back to history

That scientis would be a moron because anthrax isn't contagious.

found some info. (from wiki.)
In a similar vein, historian Norman F. Cantor, in his 2001 book In the Wake of the Plague, suggests the Black Death might have been a combination of pandemics including a form of anthrax, a cattle murrain. He cites many forms of evidence including: reported disease symptoms not in keeping with the known effects of either bubonic or pneumonic plague, the discovery of anthrax spores in a plague pit in Scotland, and the fact that meat from infected cattle was known to have been sold in many rural English areas prior to the onset of the plague. It is notable that the means of infection varied widely, from human-to-human contact as in Iceland (rare for plague and cutaneous Bacillus anthracis) to infection in the absence of living or recently-dead humans, as in Sicily (which speaks against most viruses). Also, diseases with similar symptoms were generally not distinguished between in that period (see murrain above), at least not in the Christian world; Chinese and Muslim medical records can be expected to yield better information which however only pertains to the specific disease(s) which affected these areas.
 
The world-wide "Spanish flu" or influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 killed between 50 and 100 million people, possibly more than the Black Death.
Worst of all, forms of it still exist in the guise of bird flu and the MSR bug
which has been killing thousands in hospitals. So it's not all over yet.:(
 
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