262014 Ebola Outbreak

About 30 men were drafted to burn the bodies of those who had died from Ebola in Liberia, where cremation is a huge cultural taboo. Despite playing a large role in stopping the 2014 Ebola outbreak, the 30 “Ebola burners” are still shunned in their communities and even by their families.
27. There was a massive outbreak of syphilis in the affluent county of Rockdale in Georgia in the 1990s. The outbreak affected nearly 200 high school teens. The teens were having sex parties fuelled by various drugs and alcohol. The cause of the outbreak was a transient man joining the sex parties.
28. During the 1952 polio epidemic in Denmark, the mortality rate was over 85% due to a shortage of respirators. Dr. Bjorn Ibsen invented a new kind of ventilator, proved it worked, and then recruited thousands of volunteers to hand-pump them for weeks (they were fully manual). With his invention, the mortality rate fell to 26%.
29. In 1993, Jack in the Box caused the most infamous food poison outbreak in contemporary history. 732 people were infected with E. coli, 4 children died and 178 other victims were left with permanent injury including kidney and brain damage.
30. 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.
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31Hepatitis A Outbreaks

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.
32. 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.
33. 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.
34. In 2011, contestants in a Utah rodeo queen contest were forced to use stick ponies due to an outbreak of horse herpes.
35. 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.
36Ebola Outbreak Patient 0

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.
37. Salem witch trials were in part caused by an outbreak of ergot, a fungus that grows on rye and causes hallucinations.
38. 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.
39. 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.”
40. The Moscow plague riot of 1771 was caused by an outbreak of bubonic plague. The city’s economy was mostly paralyzed because industries had been closed down. All of this was followed by acute food shortages, leading to huge crowds rioting, and demands for the elimination of quarantines.