Humanity have fighting viruses since ages andsometimes they had good results with vaccines and antiviral drugs. We are facing such a problem right today with Covid-19 virus coming from China.

Recently many viruses have jumped from animals to humans and became much more dangerous. Ebola in 2014-2016 in Africa was a terrible disaster but there are other viruses equally deadly including the new Coronavirus killing people around the world.

Here is a list of the worst deadly virus based on the percent of people dead for the infection.

1. Marburg virus

Identified in 1967 in Germany where some workers were exposed from monkeys from Uganda, Marburg virus is similar to Ebola both we have hemorrhagic fever, organ failure and death.

Mortality rate at first was 25%, but it was more than 80% in the 1998-2000 in Congo, as well as in the 2005 in Angola, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). 

2. Ebola virus

The first Ebola epidemic was in 1976 at the same time in Sudan and Congo, it spreaded with body fluids of people and animals. Ebola it's been famous to be really deadly, in Bundibugyo the lethality was 50%, in Sudan up to 71% according to WHO.

3. Rabies

Rabies is still a big problem in India and Africa despite the introduction of the vaccines for pets in 1920. Rabies destroys the brain when you get bitten by a rabid animal.

If you don't get treatment you have 100% chances to die.

4. HIV

This is the most known deadly virus, the HIV and it's one of the biggest causes of death for people around the world. Almost 32 milion people died for HIV since early 1980s.

Nowadays people can survive with HIV using powerful antiviral drugs, but this virus keep on kill in many countries, specially the poor ones. Nearly 1 in every 25 adults in Africa is HIV-positive, accounting for more than two-thirds of the people living with HIV worldwide.  

5. Smallpox

In 1980, the World Health Assembly declared Smallpox defeated. Humans fighted smallpox for thousands of years, and the virus killed about 1 in 3 of those it infected. It left survivors with deep, permanent scars and, often, blindness.

With high mortality outside Europe, where people had little contact with the virus before visitors brought it to their regions.  They say that 90% of the native Americans died from smallpox introduced by European explorers. In the 20th century smallpox killed 300 million people.

6. Hantavirus

Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome (HPS) appeared in the U.S. in 1993 in a Navajo couple having severe breathing problems. Hantavirus was then isolated few months later from a deer mouse. Afterwords more than 600 people were infected and 36% of those died.

This is a peculiar virus cause is not trasmitted from human to human but from mices to human. 

While the virus was new to Western medicine when it was discovered in the U.S., researchers realized later that Navajo medical traditions describe a similar illness, and linked the disease to mice.