• Question: What's the deadliest bacterium in human history? Why?

    Asked by y7 on 17 Jul 2023.
    • Photo: Bruno Silvester Lopes

      Bruno Silvester Lopes answered on 17 Jul 2023:

      Mycobacterium tuberculosis. It has the unique ability to assume a form where it cannot multiply and just keep sleeping unless the conditions become favourable when it can cause severe disease. It claims 2 million lives each year!

    • Photo: Kip Heath

      Kip Heath answered on 20 Jul 2023:

      In the sense of causing the most deaths over history? Probably Yersinia pestis – also known as the plague. During the Black Death in the 1340s it killed between 75 and 200 million people – that’s more than the entire population of the UK.

      Now we can easily treat it with antibiotics.

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