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V6Ga t1_j67f555 wrote

Reply to comment by insidiouslybleak in TIL cholera was reintroduced to Haiti after a century by UN peacekeepers responding to the 2010 earthquake. The resulting outbreak was the worst on record, killing 10,000 and infecting 820,000. by theworkinglad

The number one cause of death in the world is diarrhea.

EDIT: further research on this has led me to believe that I read a stat on the number one cause of death for children. Also, as a happy fact, access to safe drinking water has made some astonishing gains in the last 30 years.

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mike117 t1_j687ebo wrote

Got a source for that? Not that I don’t believe you I’m just surprised it’s above stuff like heart attacks or war.

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V6Ga t1_j68asrk wrote

I think if you search around you will find you are correct! Random results of chasing after the answer showed me some stuff!

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/the-top-10-causes-of-death

Clearly the work done in getting safe water has been way more effective than I was paying attention to. My statement was correct at one point, IIRC. It stuck with me, and you asking made me check! I may have read a statistic on causes of death of children. Either way, I am glad you asked!

War has always been pretty ineffective at killing people, though the people it kills are the engines that drove countries, historically: young males. And the concomitant civil unrest causes serious excess deaths. The Iraq war "only" killed 4500 US troops, and 15,000 Iraqi forces, but total excess deaths number as high as 1 million.

WWI had total military deaths at 10 million, but the resultant spread of Spanish flu caused at least 50 million deaths, and maybe as much as 100 million, in a world population of 1.5 billion.

Epidemics were the only truly effective killers, outside of China, which has had some insanely deadly civil wars, but the big one, The Taiping Rebellion, killed most people from the resultant famine from loss of central government control over irrigation and flood control. (30 million deaths out of a population of 450 million.)

Justinian's Plague,

>The Justinian plague in the sixth century and is estimated to have killed between 30 and 50 million people—about half the world's population at that time—as it spread across Asia, North Africa, Arabia, and Europe.

Black Death >The Black Death was the second great natural disaster to strike Europe during the Late Middle Ages (the first one being the Great Famine of 1315–1317) and is estimated to have killed 30 percent to 60 percent of the European population, as well as about one-third of the population of the Middle East.[14][15][16] The plague might have reduced the world population from c. 475 million to 350–375 million in the 14th century

and Spanish Flu all killed a significant percentage of the world's population.

Of course the 20th century managed to make men capable to serious mechanized death. Hitler, Stalin, and Mao all killed a serious percentage of their own countries populations.

TL;DR Justinian's Plague killed half the world's population!

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Kuris t1_j6fuegt wrote

Germs are no joke! As a grown ass man, a scrape on my elbow has put me in the hospital for 5 days now.

Without access to modern medicine (and antibiotics in particular) this shit would've killed me!

That is scary, scary stuff.

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arkstfan t1_j6a4vm9 wrote

Arkansas Bioscience Institute a partnership of the University of Arkansas, Arkansas State University, UA Medical Sciences and Arkansas Children’s Hospital have been working on a vaccine for some common causes of diarrhea. Their work has been promising enough to get some international funding.

Didn’t realize how big a deal it was until reading about it.

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