2) Rickets – This is a disease tied to inadequate amounts of Vitamin D and calcium in the diet, which causes weakened bones and other deformities if not treated with changes in diet and added supplements. Health officials attribute the lack of nutrients to poor wages and higher food prices, which leads to unhealthy choices.
3) Polio – A disease that once gripped no less than President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the polio virus was once a dreaded childhood disease that brought on crippling muscle weakness, paralysis and death. While the World Health Organization claims 80 percent of the world’s countries are free of cases of the disease, it only takes one new case to spread it among the unvaccinated. It is highly contagious and potentially could cause a major outbreak in unprotected communities.
4) Leprosy – This Biblical disease once caused sufferers to be shunned into their own isolated communities. Treatments that started to be available in the 1940s were soon supplemented by the development of a full-scale range of drugs that killed the virus that causes it. Still, there were more than 200,000 new cases of leprosy as recently as 2012, with 95 percent of them coming from 16 countries, most of them very poor. Still, Brazil and China, which are in the top five of the world’s economies, were among the countries listed as harboring lepers.
5) Plague – You’ve seen the movies where a cart goes through the streets as a crier yells, “Bring out your dead!” That was the world known to those suffering from the Black Death in Europe’s Middle Ages, a disease that killed two-thirds of the European population when it peaked in the 1300s. The bubonic plague still exists even in the face of modern medicine, carried by fleas to human hosts. There are up to 3,000 cases of plague reported each year, according to the World Health Organization, and some even appear in the United States. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 15 cases in 2015.
There are other diseases that are still around and may be growing in the number of cases, including whooping cough, scarlet fever, chicken pox and the mumps. That trend is likely to continue as immigration increases and parents willingly withhold their children from vaccinations.