Yep, that’s where today’s hygene and medicine comes in. We are miles ahead of the conditions back then, although not all countries are so lucky as to have medicine and hygene easily available.
We since had the swine flu and the bird flu and such, all very nasty but mostly treatable.
What we need is less money spent on war and more on research. If all the money we spent on the Iraq war had been dumped into research, some pretty neat things could have been accomplished.