• Our biggest (recorded) killer was the Black Death (now, allegedly, a viral haemorrhagic fever - like Ebola) which wiped-out over half of Europe’s population - and brought about the collapse of medieval society - there were too few peasants to till the land and so ‘selling their labour’ rather than being serfs tied to a particular noble, gave them economic and political power over their ‘masters’. • “The Pox” of which Shakespeare wrote so much, was fresh in his and his audience’s minds - it killed his son, Hamnet (11) - with empty houses in villages and towns standing as silent reminders of whole families who succumbed. • Following the end of World War One came the Spanish Flu, which killed more than the total of all battlefield casualties in the five previous years - strangely, it was the fit and the young who proved to be at greatest risk. • The Plague of Justinian - the Roman Emperor at the time - arrived with the Goth and Visi-Goth hoards from the North and East, who then over-ran the Roman Empire and brought about it’s downfall. • The major killer of our time was the HIV virus, which then mutated into AIDS - and destroyed the immune system of those infected so that they succumbed to a host of other infections which they would otherwise have thrown-off. • The Third Plague - which originated in Yunnan Province in China - was the third wave of bubonic plague to reach Europe, after having devastated its area of origin, Hong Kong and much of India. • The Antonine Plague, once again named after an unfortunate Emperor but also known as the Galen Plague after the Roman physician who described it, was brought back from the Near East by returning Roman soldiers. It decimated Greek cities, destroying their empire, and cemented Rome as the next dominant power in the Mediterranean. • The Great Plague of London in 1665, eradicated by the rather extreme event of the Great Fire of London (1666), wiped-out a quarter of London’s population in months. Graveyards ran out of plots to bury the dead and their solution - ‘carnal pits’ - are now being un-earthed by the Cross-Rail excavations. • Asian Flu, in our more recent times (1957), a category 2 flu pandemic caused by an H3N2 strain of the influenza A virus, and a world- wide fatality of over 1 million people. Outbreaks of infections such as the_ • Russian Flu - 1899 - 1,000,000 deaths • Hong Kong Flu - 1968 - 1,000,000 deaths • Cholera 6 - 1817 - 1,000,000 deaths • Japanese Smallpox - 735 - 1,000,000 deaths • C18th plague - 1824 - 600,000 deaths • Swine Flu - 2009 - 200,000 deaths • Yellow Fever - 1890 - 100,000 deaths • Ebola - 2009 - 11.300 deaths • MERS - 2012 - 850 deaths • SARS - 2002 - 750 deaths would not even show above the base-line on the above graph. Does that put things in perspective ?