Currently the most lethal is the human immunodeficiency virus or HIV, the cause of the sadly famous AIDS disease. Since the pandemic began around 1985, more than 20 million people have died from this disease. Right now, HIV infects more than 36 million people around the world. As we all know, HIV collapses a person’s immune system, what our body uses to defend itself from external aggressions. Once a person loses much of their defenses, their body cannot fight the germs that cause infections. In other words, HIV opens the doors to real killers.
Another of the deadliest viruses is the flu. In 1918 a strain – a version – of the especially virulent influenza virus appeared. To give a few figures: it killed about 21 million worldwide, although there are those who say that 40 to 50 million people died. If those latest data are true, then the 1918 flu virus was, without question, the deadliest in a single year. But worst of all was the horrible death it caused to those who contracted it: it produced so much fluid in the lungs and so quickly that they died of drowning.
A bacterium named Yersinia pestis has the undeserved honor of being the microbe that has caused the most deaths in the world. Because Yersinia pestis is to blame for the plague. From 1347 to 1351 it killed about 75 million people, including a third of the total population of Europe. There are two forms of the disease. In the bubonic form, the bacteria cause painful pustules, or buboes, as large as an orange in the armpits, neck, and lower abdomen that burst, oozing blood and pus. Blood vessels break under the skin , giving it a bruised appearance, hence the Black Death. At least half of the victims died within a week. For its part, the pneumonic form causes excessive sweating and coughing up blood, which puddles the lungs.
All because one day in October 1347 twelve Genoese galleys arrived at the port of Messina, in Sicily. From those ships, from which it is not known very well where they came from, the plague prepared to jump to the continent. And no one was safe.
