Now that fears of the swine flu apocalypse are behind us, it’s time to start putting this mini-epidemic (minidemic?) into context. After all, comparisons to global zombiism pandemics as in 28 Days Later quickly proved excessive in this case, but there have been times when such analogies wouldn’t be so far-fetched. For posterity’s sake, Neatorma takes us through The 5 Deadliest Pandemics in History, like the Antonine Plague that killed roughly 5 million people over 15 years during the second century CE.

The most terrifying – because it was first identified in a Kansas military camp in March 1918 then spread to virtually every corner of the world before being contained by June 1920 – was the Spanish Flu (sufferers in Oakland, California, seen at right), which killed between 50 and 100 million. Though it occured in the U.S. and central Europe long before appearing in Spain, the Spanish Flu received its name because the nation was neutral in WWI, and so had no special press censorship laws in place that prevented reporting the devastating disease.