5 Epidemics Science Still Can’t Explain

A school where the students could not stop laughing. A city where hundreds of people danced for weeks. A disease that killed healthy men in a single day, then vanished forever. A plague that wiped out millions in Mexico. And a sleeping sickness that froze its survivors like statues for decades. Five outbreaks. Five mysteries. And modern science still cannot fully explain any of them. Chapters 0:00 Five unsolved epidemics 1:10 The Laughter Epidemic – Tanganyika, 1962 3:25 The Dancing Plague – Strasbourg, 1518 6:41 The Sweating Sickness – England, 1485–1551 9:34 Cocoliztli – Mexico, 1545 & 1576 12:50 The Sleeping Sickness – 1915–1927 15:40 Could any of them return? Which one is the strangest to you? Tell me in the comments. Image credits Oliver Sacks – photo by Luigi Novi, CC BY 3.0 (Wikimedia Commons) Dancing pilgrims at Molenbeek – after Pieter Bruegel the Elder / Pieter Brueghel the Younger (public domain) Henry VII (1505) and Thomas Cromwell by Hans Holbein the Younger (public domain) Strasbourg – Braun & Hogenberg, Civitates Orbis Terrarum (public domain) Aztec codex images of the 1544–1545 epidemic (public domain) Constantin von Economo and encephalitis lethargica patients, 1920s (public domain) #history #unsolvedmysteries #epidemic