Infectious disease could have far reaching effect from wiping out significant
percentage of population to the collapse of states. Aginam (2004) in an article linking
infectious diseases and human security gave some of the examples: Plague devastated the
city of Athens during the Peloponnesian War in 430 BC. The Plague of Justinian killed a
third of population, and eventually led to the collapse of the Byzantine Roman Empire. In
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, small pox, measles, influenza, chicken pox, and
scarlet fever decimated Native American populations as a result of their earliest contacts
with Europeans. From 1918-1919 more than 20 million people died as a result of the global
epidemic of swine flu.