| Which is the worst disease ? |
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Asked 3 years ago
by theaskcompass  Germany |
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About
DOCTOR
M.B.B.S
M.S
M.B.A
I.A.S
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8 Points
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On the basis of the proportion of people who died it has to be plague.
I'm not sure. Plague has killed what, several hundred million? Cancer deaths in 2000 alone was about 6 million world wide, which is about 0.1% of the world population. There is little reason to believe that cancer rates where any order of magnitude less in the past than they are today, and in fact a lot of people who died hundreds of years ago and "just got sick" or "died of old age" may have died of a cancer they didn't know about or couldn't detect at the time. Though I could be wrong, I think cancer could easily have killed more people than plague.
As far as which is the worst today. Well the only one on the list that I wouldn't be very upset if I contracted is the cold.
Cancer is mainly, though of course not enitely, a disease of the old. In earlier centuries most people did not live long enough to reach the high risk age groups.
Of course more people have died of cancer than of plague. But plague killed young and old and sometimes wiped out populations of entire villages. What proportion of the population of Europe died of the plague in the 1300s - a third or a half?