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The earliest recorded example of bacteriological warfare seems to be the Hittite plague (1715 BC): A long-lasting epidemic that plagued the Eastern Mediterranean in the 14th century BC was traced back to a focus in Canaan along the Arwad-Euphrates trading route. The symptoms, mode of infection, and geographical area, identified the agent as Francisella ...

This happening is known as The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre. It took place in 1902 in Hanoi, which was a French colony at that time. At the beginning action was a success, but as the bounty was granted for every rat's tail, soon the town was occupied by rats with cut out tails, that were left alive for breeding, and there were more and more rat farms in the ...

The one pandemic disease we know of that has a good chance for having an origin in the Americas is syphilis. When it first hit Europe in 1494 it spread rapidly and the mortality rate was very high (as is typical with new diseases that hit an immunologically naieve population). As Jared Diamond describes it, "[W]hen syphilis was first definitely ...

According to wikipedia, the current title for the earliest documented use would be the Hittites with the bacterial disease Tularemia in the mid second millenium BC. According to the texts, infected people were sent into enemy territory to help spread the plague there.

I heard a few interviews with an author of a book that went into this subject on the NPR circuit a few years back. Sadly, I didn't pick it up, and don't remember the book's name now. I do vaguely remember hearing that when it was going around, so many people were sick (not to mention dying), that in a lot of places society hit a kind of tipping point and ...

You can find the answer to that question in Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs and Steel. He states that people get infected by their pets and that all great epidemics (variola, tuberculosis, malaria, plague, influenza ...) evolved from animals. Microbes needs a mass of people to spread around so big societies, living in cities and connected with good trading ...

When I was out west a number of years ago, a friend asserted that the disappearance of the "Anasazi" civilization of native Americans could have occurred for any number of reasons, including disease. Unfortunately, I don't think modern scholarship on the subject agrees with his assertion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anasazi Widespread disease generally ...