What disease would most likely wipe out humanity?

Question: What disease would most likely wipe out humanity?
- Keywords:
  end of the world,
  infection,
  microbe
Asked by to Bethany, Hannah, Keith, Peter, Ramya on 19 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
- Hannah Tanner answered on 19 Jun 2014:
  
  No infectious disease we know of because we are all still here!
  
  It would have to spread easily enough to make sure everyone got infected so it would have to go via route that everyone could be exposed to. Something airborne would be more likely to kill everyone that something that was only spread by a mosquito that only lives in hot places.
  
  It would also need to not kill people too fast so that they had enough time to infect a good number of other people.
  
  It would however need to kill everyone fast enough that they didn’t get a chance to become immune and survive.
  
  It’s actually not a good strategy for any pathogen to kill everyone off. If it killed off every person it could live in it would soon become homeless and would die out itself.
- Peter Elliott answered on 19 Jun 2014:
  
  This is a very important question and it is why several government agencies monitor outbreaks of disease in the world to work out if it could wipe out humanity.
  
  A few years ago you may have heard of bird flu and swine flu as potential diseases that could transfer from animals into humans. So far this has not occurred at the levels required to create a pandemic.
  
  However, I personally don’t think there will be one disease that will wipe out humanity. The genetic variation that exists within our population of 7 billion means that some people will survive a pandemic. It has happened before and will happen again. The only possible disease that may wipe us out is ourselves, but maybe I am getting to philosophical now.
- Bethany Dearlove answered on 21 Jun 2014:
  
  I’m with Peter – there’s so much diversity in the human population, that it’d be very difficult for a single disease to wipe out the whole of humanity. If we look back to some of the worst diseases in history, two stand out:
  ~ the Black Death or plague, caused by Yersinia pestis, which killed up to half of the European population and up to 200 million worldwide in the thirteenth century, and
  ~ the 1918 influenza (flu) pandemic, which killed more people than died from all causes in World War I (1914-18), with estimates upwards of 50 million.
  Both diseases are still around today, though in less dangerous forms. There’s a lot of research into them, trying to understand what was different about the versions of the disease that caused so many deaths, so we can try to predict if and when it might occur, and how to treat it.

Question: What disease would most likely wipe out humanity?

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