Possible points to discuss: both claimed millions of lives and spread quickly across country borders; no one understood the cause of either disease; no one had a cure for either disease; diagnosis was almost certainly a death sentence; people often deserted those who fell ill because of the fear of contagion spreading; suppositions of how one could become infected were often not true; animals were involved in the initial spread of each disease (rats and primates); neither disease had an official name for quite some time.
Our solar system formed about 4.5 billion years ago from a dense cloud of interstellar gas and dust. The cloud collapsed, possibly due to the shockwave of a nearby exploding star, called a supernova. When this dust cloud collapsed, it formed a solar nebula—a spinning, swirling disk of material.
At the center, gravity pulled more and more material in. Eventually the pressure in the core was so great that hydrogen atoms began to combine and form helium, releasing a tremendous amount of energy. With that, our Sun was born, and it eventually amassed more than 99 percent of the available matter.
