All deadly epidemics have an epicenter: a single person who first caught the disease
before spreading it to others.
Or in other words, "Patient Zero".
Here we present to you the patient zero victims of the deadliest epidemics in the world.
Number 9: Gaetan Dugas The term "patient zero" originated from Gaeten
Dugas, a man who for years was believed to be the man who brought HIV to the US.
Dugas was a flight attendant working for Air Canada, and was diagnosed with AIDS in the
early 80s.
The disease was first clinically observed among the gay community in the US in 1981.
In 1984, the CDC conducted a study to try to track down its origin in the country.
They traced the sexual partners of infected gay and bisexual men in New York and California,
and came to the conclusion that Gaetan Dugas was the index case responsible for carrying
the HIV virus, presumably from Europe.
Dugas was referred to as "patient O", the O standing for "Outside of California".
However, it was later read as the number 0, leading to the origin of the term "patient
zero" for all index patients who start epidemics of any diseases.
Gaetan himself died from complications due to AIDS in 1984, but his name lived on as
the man who gave the AIDS to the US.
Ironically, the original patient zero turned out to not be a real patient zero at all.
According to a study published very recently in September 2016, HIV had arrived to New
York City as early as 1970, and was linked to existing cases in Haiti and other countries
in the Caribbean.
Number 8: Typhoid Mary Typhoid fever is a nasty bacterial disease
spread by the digestion of food and water contaminated with an infected person's feces
or urine.
Symptoms include vomiting, diarrhea, and a terrible rash.
However, there are those who exhibit no symptoms at all.
These people, called carriers, are more of a threat as they could unknowingly and unsuspectingly
spread the disease to others.
The most famous of Typhoid carriers is Mary Mallon.
Mary was originally from Ireland, and worked as a cook for wealthy families in New York
City after immigrating to the US.
It was the early 20th Century, and Typhoid was mainly a problem in poor communities,
but thanks to Typhoid Mary - as she would later be known as - rich people got sick with
the disease as well.
She worked for multiple families throughout the years, and all of them got sick eating
her cooking.
She managed to avoid detection many times, as when investigators came; she had already
moved to work at a different house.
Mary was eventually caught in 1907 with the help of a freelance sanitary engineer who
was hired by her landlord to search for the source of the outbreak infecting his household.
After testing positive for typhoid, she was quarantined on North Brother Island, a tiny
island east of Manhattan.
After 3 years, Mary was released on the condition that she not work as a cook anymore.
She ignored the warning, and took a cooking job at a women's hospital, causing another
Typhoid outbreak.
Police caught her, and this time she was permanently incarcerated.
She died in 1938, and an autopsy found evidence of live typhoid bacteria in her gallbladder.
Number 7: Haitian Cholera Patient Zero The 2010 Haiti earthquake was a disaster of
epic proportions, resulting in the death of over 100,000 civilians and billions of dollars
in damages to the already poverty stricken country.
The Haitians terrible misfortune seemed to know no end, as a terrible cholera outbreak
immediately followed the earthquake.
Almost undoubtedly, researchers claim the first person to contract the illness was a
28 year old mentally ill man from the town of Mirebalai.
The man who was known as the village's "crazy person" often walked stark naked through town
to clean himself at a river which drained sewage waste from a UN encampment nearby that
housed Nepali peacekeepers.
That encampment is believed to be the source, as Haiti's cholera epidemic is that of the
Nepali strain.
The mentally ill man developed severe diarrhea in late 2010, and died within a day.
The men who dealt with his body also fell ill shortly, and soon the Cholera bacteria
had spread to the entire town, country, and even neighboring Dominican Republic.
The Haitian cholera problem is still ongoing today with over 700,000 locals known to have
contracted the disease, with the death toll reaching 9000.
Number 6: Mabalo Lokela Ebola is one of the worst infectious diseases
of this century.
For the past few years the disease has devastated West Africa, and caused waves of panic across
the world with several cases occurring outside the African continent.
Ebola still has no cure or vaccine, and thousands of infected individuals have died suffering
massive internal hemorrhage.
The disease is named after the Ebola River, which flows near a small village named Yambuku
in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
In 1976, a teacher there by the name of Mabalo Lokela got extremely sick after returning
from a trip outside the village.
He was initially treated as a case of malaria, but got continuously worse, and bled profusely
from all orifices including his eyes, mouth and nose.
He died in less than 2 weeks.
Unfortunately for the villagers, the Ebola virus lived on, having already infected other
people close to Mabalo. 21 of his friends and relatives got critically ill, and 18 of
them died.
Sadly, 11 of the 17 of Yambuku Hospital's staff also died, forcing the hospital to be
closed.
Outside assistance was sought, and experts managed to identify and produce the first
ever description of the Ebola virus and the disease it caused.
In all, 280 deaths had been recorded in the outbreak.
Number 5: Dr. Liu Jianlin Severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS,
starts like a typical flu but would rapidly develop into a critical case of pneumonia
and eventually death from respiratory failure.
We might not hear of any more cases of SARS today, but the viral disease was seen as a
serious threat to the global population in 2003, with a total of 774 reported deaths
in 37 countries.
The disease was first identified in Guangdong, in southern China, and the local government
did all they could to contain and eliminate the disease before it spread.
A medical doctor identified as Dr. Liu Jianlin from mainland China unknowingly caught the
infection, and travelled to Hong Kong in 2003.
There, he resided in the Metropole Hotel in Kowloon, and infected 16 other hotel guests.
Those people then traveled outside the country, heading to Canada, Singapore, Taiwan, and
Vietnam, causing further spread of SARS to those locations, turning it into a global
pandemic.
Dr Liu was reported to have succumbed to the disease, dying from respiratory failure.
Although originating from mainland China, Hong Kong ended up with the majority of SARS
victims.
Thankfully, the global threat was finally contained and no SARS cases have been reported
since 2004.
Number 4: Edgar Enrique Hernandez In the remote village of La Gloria in Mexico,
stands a bronze statue of a smiling five year old boy.
The subject is a real life boy named Edgar Enrique Hernandez, also known as Nino Cero
or Kid Zero, survivor and first person recognized to have contracted the infamous new strain
of H1N1 virus known as swine flu.
The disease spread wide in 2009, causing a worldwide influenza pandemic that killed over
14,000 people.
It all started in early 2009, when many villagers in La Gloria fell ill in a short period of
a few weeks, including two babies who died.
Little Edgar was among the first to get sick, and later investigations confirmed the sickness
plaguing the village to be the work of a new strain of H1N1 virus, with Edgar as a possible
patient zero.
Luckily, the 5 year old survived his ordeal, having recovered fully with no lasting complications.
Number 3: Emile Ouamouno In December 2013, a two year old Guinean village
boy named Emile Oumono suddenly got seriously ill, and died four days later.
His other family members followed suit, starting by his older sister, then their pregnant mother,
then grandmother, and then a number of villagers.
Researchers now believe that that village deep in the forests of Guinea was the source
of the Ebola virus epidemic that ravaged West Africa for the next 2 years, and little Emile
was patient zero.
He is theorized to have contracted the disease while playing near a tree that housed Ebola-infected
free-tail bats.
Starting from Guinea, the Ebola virus spread across borders like wildfire, hitting neighboring
Liberia, Sierra Leone, Senegal, Mali, and Nigeria.
When the epidemic ended in early 2016, over 11,000 lives were lost, and left about 17,000
survivors, many of whom still suffering side effects in the form of muscle and joint pain,
blindness, and various neurological problems.
The outbreak is considered the most widespread Ebola virus epidemic in history.
Number 2: Private Albert Gitchell Nearly everyone knows of how terrible World
War 1 was - a futile war that killed 17 million people and caused millions more to suffer.
But not many know of the Spanish flu pandemic which started in the final year of the war.
The deadly influenza outbreak lasted for 3 years and resulted in the deaths of more people
than the war.
Between 50 to 100 million infected people died, which was around 3 to 5 percent of the
entire world's population!
It all began when Private Albert Gitchell, a company cook at a US Army Base in Kansas,
reported to the sick bay.
He had developed a terrible cough, and before the medics had him quarantined, other soldiers
in the camp had already been infected.
By noon, over a hundred soldiers who ate the food Gitchell prepared the night before had
fallen ill.
In less than a week, the virus had spread to New York.
Over the next few months, the disease had crossed the Atlantic, inflicting both sides
of the war at the European theatre.
Due to Spain not being involved in the war, they imposed no wartime censorship, leading
to greater press coverage of the disease.
Hence, the disease became widely known as Spanish flu.
Number 1: The Black Death Sailor One day in 1346, a very sick sailor staggered
off the Genoese galley he had been sailing in onto a harbor in Sicily.
The man who had contracted a strange illness while in Ottoman territory had developed swellings
in his armpits and groin, and his neck was stiff.
His chest ached badly and his breath gave out a terrible stench.
His skin then slowly turned black, painful buboes appeared on his body, and he eventually
died after days of suffering.
The unnamed sailor is the man who brought the plague, aka Black Death to mainland Europe
in the mid 14th Century.
He first infected his fellow soldiers, and from Sicily the disease spread throughout
Italy and eventually engulfed the entire European population, reaching as far as England and
northern Scandinavian countries within a few years.
Today, the Black Death is recognized as the most devastating pandemic in human history,
having killed around 30 to 60% of Europe's total population.