Dysentery was the leading killer of Middle Passage captives

Evidence

On the Middle Passage, mortality rates ranged from 5 to 20 percent, lowering as the centuries passed. Africans died most often from diseases, including scurvy (an acute vitamin C deficiency), smallpox, pneumonia, and tapeworms. The flux, or dysentery, the most common cause of death, produced its own slow torture of blood-soaked diarrhea and incessant vomiting, triggered by a bacterial infection from contaminated food or water. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 285

Categorization

• QUESTION: The treatment of dysentery as a cause of death is factual / medically grounded; worth pulling the underlying primary-source estimate into the article on sacrifice or the case study.