What is the death rate due to herpes?

If you are talking genital herpes, close to zero, however, it is an extremely unpleasant disease from what I've heard, and unlike cold sores, where only one or two will appear at a time, genital herpes sores will appear in clusters and unless treated, over time they will ruin your genitals.

"If you want to get with me, why don't you learn to forget my past, I've been with other guys...."

Yeah, not a chance in hell; personally I like my genitalia clean thanks.

However the herpes virus is not restricted to genital; I believe the cold and flu viruses, the various strains, are in the herpes family, and if we define both of them to mean herpes in the late 19th and early 20th century, in other Words what is defined in Britain as the late Victorian era, Influenza was widely feared and by that definition then, Herpes is the number one killer far as diseases go. It wasn't restricted just to the west; in the late Victorian era, some people thought that the apocalypse was nigh, close to a full billion people lost their lives to the flu during that period, the only time in human history, or one of the times, where the world's population decreased.

The reason influenza isn't as lethal today in fact has nothing to do with advances in medicine, so much as the fact that people most vulnerable to it were killed off all over the world. There was a similar effect in Europe and the Middle East regarding the black death; the black death stopped its killing, not from better medicine, but simply because it left alive only those people with resistance to it. Now, the flu did not lead the human race to the brink of extinction, nevertheless it DID shave off a significant slice of the world's population.

Contrary to doom and gloom predictors, there is no need to worry about viral outbreaks, or similar pandemics occurring in modern times for a very good reason; airplanes. The reason native Americans were killed by smallpox, is because they were reproductively isolated from Europeans for so long, as well as never having had contact with them, at least significant, that they were never exposed to the virus. A similar thing happened to Europe regarding the black death; because Europe is separated from the middle east and Asia by mountain ranges, they had little contact with middle easterners until the crusades, around the time the black death and Bubonic Plague and all that got started. During the Victorian era, people were traveling around the world more than ever before, so countless millions became infected the world over not just in isolated regions. Despite the best efforts to quarantine epidemics, it only takes one individual to cough or sneeze on someone else to cause an outbreak somewhere, and because people are constantly being exposed, and because travel is so fast in modern times compared to previoius eras of humanity, people are constantly exposed all over the world. Because of our built up immunity, it takes extreme diseases such as Ebola and AIDS to do people in now.

To answer your question, don't listen to those panicky doom and gloom "a virus will kill us all" people; the majority of viruses have been rendered harmless as much as by the human imune system as well as advances in medical science.