Could something like the Black Death happen again?

Some 800 years later it re-emerged as the Black Death, a blight that killed 50 million Europeans over a four year period from 1347 to 1351 — an astounding figure, to be sure. It's a death rate that averages out to 34,245 mortalities per day. read more

Hence, it is unlikely that there will be a disease that manages to infect people at such a high rate as the Black Death. The only way this could happen is if the carriers do not exhibit any symptoms and look like perfectly healthy people, giving the disease a chance to spread undercover, before 'activating' its symptoms and killing off a large portion of the population. read more

Research into one of the most devastating pandemics in human history - the Plague of Justinian, where half the world's population died - found evidence that such an episode could happen again. Scientists who isolated genetic traces of the plague from the teeth of two 1,500-year-old victims found it was caused by a distinctly different bacterial strain from that responsible for the later Black Death. read more