disease

Please keep the objectifying jokes to a minimum One of the great medical mysteries of history is that, while yellow fever escaped the confines of Africa and became established in the New World (with dramatic consequences for history) it never did so in tropical Asia. I wonder what happens if...

First some context: The eradication of diseases has been one of the triumphs of the modern era, and as humanity progresses attention has turned to various tropical diseases as future targets for elimination. Compared to diseases like HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis; neglected tropical diseases...

The 1918 Influenza Pandemic killed more people than World War I (?!). It seemed like almost no country knew how to deal with the pandemic effectively, resulting in millions of deaths. How could the world have handled the 1918 Influenza Pandemic, or were the high death tolls inevitable due to...

So there was an outbreak of Typhus during the Russian Civil War, And 2-3 Million people died. So what if it was more infectious, infectious enough to cripple the Soviet government, army, and economy? Then a second wave takes down the Russian Republic, turning it into Anarchy and more Civil...

What if the Sweating Sickness, the bane of Tudor England and parts of Europe from 1485 to 1551, had not disappeared after its last outbreak and continued, even in a weaker manner, to exist all the way to modern times (since it didn't work in a way that permits vaccination, as people who got it...

https://minds.wisconsin.edu/bitstream/handle/1793/34895/1342562.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y This study is one of many that underscores the point that Liberian settlers experienced a devastating death rate due to tropical diseases. The mortality rate was extremely high, and made it so that the...

In OTL horses couldn't live in Sub-Saharan Africa except in some narrow bands of territory in the Horn, Sahel, and South Africa. This is because of Sleeping Sickness carried by Tsetse flies which lays waste to horses. Now to an extent this helped the Bantu peoples by holding off Eurasian...

Tsetse flies are often blamed (perhaps justifiably) for hurting efforts to build large empires and cities in Sub-Saharan Africa. Now of course cities and empires were built but it is poignant that the greatest empires such as Mali and Ethiopia were built in areas without tsetse flies. So somehow...

What if the Plague of Athens that struck the city-state during the second year of the Peloponnesian War had been less devastating, or hadn't happened at all? How might that affect the course of the war and other events?

After the nuclear exchange blasts away most of civilization, how badly would disease outbreaks affect the survivor? How widespread would the epidemics be? Which diseases would possibly be the most virulent? Timeframe is post-1983.

How would 1/3 of Mankind perishing affect the rest of the century? Would Fascism and communism still gell? How long would it take for industrial civilization to get back on its feet? Would European rule in the colonies collapse?

In OTL, the Norse settlers in America were driven out quickly. So quickly, in fact, that there were no major epidemics spread by them in America, leaving the Spanish in 1492 to spread disease such as smallpox to screw over the Indians. Let's say the Vinlandic colony survives longer and...

Few days ago I was talking to a friend about the outbreak of Black Plague and he explained me an interesting theory according to which Plague became less common 'cause of the diffusion of grey rats that substituted black rats (Grey rats' fleas when rats die move to other rats and not to humans...

I'm working on a TL which is actually ASB, but has an event which could arise in non-ASB situations. So in 1956, something happens which causes the population to fall drastically. Could be a disease affecting fertility levels say, or something infectious like the post WW1 flu epidemic which...

If the black Death had never developed (or at least never reached the west) and had never killed a large part of the population of northern Europe, how would these kingdoms have reacted to high population pressure and colder climate? New raids in Europe? Invasion of central or Eastern Europe...