There have been a number of significant pandemics in human history, all of them generally zoonoses that came about with domestication of animals - such as smallpox, diphtheria, influenza and tuberculosis. There have been a number of particularly significant epidemics that deserve mention above the 'mere' destruction of cities:
The epidemic disease of wartime was typhus; because of this pattern it was sometimes called Camp Fever. Emerging during the Crusades, it had its first impact in Europe in 1489 in Spain. During fighting between the Christian Spaniards and the Muslims in Granada, the Spanish lost 3,000 to war casualties and 20,000 to typhus. In 1528 the French lost 18,000 troops in Italy and lost supremacy in Italy to the Spanish. In 1542, 30,000 people died of typhus while fighting the Ottomans in the Balkans. The disease also played a major role in the destruction of Napoleon's grande armée in Russia in 1811.
Encounters between European explorers and populations in the rest of the world often introduced local epidemics of extraordinary virulence. Disease killed the entire native (Guanches) population of the Canary Islands in the 16th century. Half the native population of Hispaniola in 1518 was killed by smallpox. Smallpox also ravaged Mexico in the 1520s (killing 150,000 including the emperor in Tenochtitlan alone) and Peru in the 1530s, aiding the European conquerors; measles killed a further two million Mexican natives in the 1600s. As late as 1848-49 as many as 40,000 out of 150,000 Hawaiians are estimated to have died of measles, whooping cough and influenza.
There are also a number of unknown diseases that were extremely serious but have now vanished and the etiology of the disease cannot be established. Examples include the previously mentioned plague in 430 BCE Greece and the English Sweat in sixteenth-century England which struck people down in an instant and was more greatly feared even than the bubonic plague.
Diseases that may possibly attain pandemic proportions include Lassa fever, Rift Valley fever, Marburg, Ebola and Bolivian haemorrhagic fever[?]. As of 2002, however, the recent emergence of these diseases into the human population means their virulence is such that they tend to 'burn out' in geographically confined areas, or that their effect on humans is currently limited.
AIDS can be considered a global pandemic but it is currently most extensive in southern and eastern Africa and is restricted to a small proportion of the population in other countries, and is only spreading slowly in those countries.
Antibiotic-resistant superbugs may also revive diseases previously regarded as 'conquered'.
In 2003, there are concerns that SARS, a new highly contagious form of pneumonia, may become pandemic.
wikipedia.org dumped 2003-03-17 with terodump