Curated category
Vaccine-preventable diseases
- TuberculosisTuberculosis once carried the name the white death, and in 19th-century New England, its slow march through families was blamed on vampires.
- SmallpoxOn the 26th of October 1977, a hospital cook named Ali Maow Maalin fell ill in Merca, Somalia. His was the last naturally occurring case of indigenous…
- MeaslesMeasles has been killing people since at least the 4th century BC, and the Persian physician Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi described it as "more to be…
- CholeraCholera, caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae, has the power to kill an untreated person within hours. A healthy adult can lose ten to twenty litres of…
- Typhoid feverTyphoid fever has killed presidents, composers, and princes. It silenced Wilbur Wright in 1912, took Franz Schubert at 31, and may have helped launch the…
- MalariaMalaria has placed the greatest selective pressure on the human genome in recent history. It has reshaped our blood, our chromosomes, and the very shape of…
- DiphtheriaDiphtheria killed an estimated million people a year before the 1980s, yet most listeners today have never seen a case. In 1735, a throat illness swept…
- Whooping coughA child draws a breath after a fit of coughing and the air rushes in with a high-pitched whoop. That sound gives whooping cough one of its names.
- InfluenzaInfluenza infects between 5 and 15 percent of the global population in a typical year. The math is staggering. Somewhere between 3 and 5 million of those…
- TyphusTyphus killed more French soldiers during Napoleon's retreat from Moscow in 1812 than Russian bullets did. That single fact captures something essential…
- Yellow feverYellow fever kills up to half of the people who reach its most severe stage. That is a startling number for a disease the world has known about since the…
- PolioPolio has been leaving its mark on human bodies for at least four thousand years. The earliest known physical evidence comes from the remains of a teenage…
- ChickenpoxChickenpox earned its first documented mention in 1658, and ever since, people have argued about where the name came from.
- ChlamydiaChlamydia is the most common bacterial sexually transmitted infection in the United Kingdom, and it affects roughly 4.2% of women and 2.7% of men worldwide.
- Dengue feverDengue fever is a mosquito-borne disease that infects billions of people around the world, caused by a virus with four distinct forms that behave almost like…
- EbolaEbola kills, on average, half of everyone it infects. That single statistic sits at the heart of why this disease has shaped public health responses…