Contagious Chronicles: 35 Intriguing Facts About Historical Disease Outbreaks

The Manhattan Company, a New York bank from the 18th to 19th Centuries, caused massive outbreaks of cholera in New York by supplying sewage-laden water. They later became JP Morgan.

27. While Hepatitis B shots are a federal requirement for school children, Hepatitis A shots are left to the states to decide. Hepatitis A has the more common outbreaks when someone who is infected doesn’t wash their hands and then handles food or surfaces.

28. Improperly handled raw milk is responsible for nearly three times more hospitalizations than any other food-borne disease outbreak, making it one of the world’s most dangerous food products.

29. The Iditarod dog sled race started out as a real relay dog race in 1925 to transport fresh diphtheria antitoxin to the remote town of Nome, Alaska to quell an outbreak. It used to take 15-20 days to make the trip and this time it took only 5 days.

30. In 2011, contestants in a Utah rodeo queen contest were forced to use stick ponies due to an outbreak of horse herpes.

In 2014, scientists found a giant 30,000-year-old virus in Siberian permafrost. The virus, Pithovirus sibericum, was still infectious and began killing amoebas. This raised concerns that melting or drilling arctic ice could unearth previously undiscovered pathogenic virus outbreaks.

32. The ‘patient zero’ of the 2014 West African Ebola outbreak was a Guinean child who played with bats residing in a hollow cola tree. It is unknown whether the bats were the ultimate source of the infection since either by coincidence or as a result of that public warning, the tree was burnt down.

33. Salem witch trials were in part caused by an outbreak of ergot, a fungus that grows on rye and causes hallucinations.

34. In 1962, there was an outbreak of mass hysteria in the nation of Tanzania where Thousands of people would laugh for days or even weeks and this hysteria then spread to Uganda. Victims would also suffer from crying attacks, pain, fainting, and random screaming and violence. Blood tests were sent to Europe and concluded nothing abnormal. The episodes lasted several hours to up to 16 days in recurring attacks.

35. The New York City Dept of Health and researchers from Columbia University monitor foodborne illness outbreaks by using a machine learning computer system that searches Yelp for keywords and phrases such as “got sick,” “vomit,” “diarrhea,” and “food poisoning.”