Största katastrofen i mänsklighetens historia?

"The first North American plague epidemic was the San Francisco plague of 1900–1904, followed by another outbreak in 1907–08.[101] From 1944 through 1993, 362 cases of human plague were reported in the United States; approximately 90% occurred in four western states: Arizona, California, Colorado, and New Mexico.[102] Plague was confirmed in the United States from 9 western states during 1995.[103] Currently, 5 to 15 people in the United States are estimated to catch the disease each year—typically in western states."[104][105]

Soon after Europeans and Africans began to arrive in the New World, bringing with them the infectious diseases of Europe and Africa, observers noted immense numbers of indigenous Americans began to die from these diseases. One reason this death toll was overlooked is that once introduced the diseases raced ahead of European immigration in many areas. Disease killed off a sizable portion of the populations before European observations (and thus written records) were made. After the epidemics had already killed massive numbers of natives, many newer European immigrants assumed that there had always been relatively few indigenous peoples. The scope of the epidemics over the years was tremendous, killing millions of people—possibly in excess of 90% of the population in the hardest hit areas—and creating one of "the greatest human catastrophe in history, far exceeding even the disaster of the Black Death of medieval Europe",[27] which had killed up to one-third of the people in Europe and Asia between 1347 and 1351. The Black Death occurred to a European population which also had not been exposed and had little or no resistance to a new disease.