Originally posted by Darth Revan
((okay then here goes: The epidemic now known as the 'black death' happened in Europe in the late 1340's. So many people died that some were convinced that it would be the end of the world. Most historians agree that Europe lost anywhere from a third to half of its population between 1347 and 1400. Here's the part I find most interesting: even today, nobody is really sure what disease it was that caused the black death. Most people blame it on a little fellow named Yersinia pestis, aka Bubonic Plague. Back in 1894, a guy named Alexandre Yersin was studying Bubonic Plague. It sounded similar enough to some of the accounts of the black death that he decided they were the same. Yersinia pestis lives in fleas that infest rodents. Once the rats got bitten by the fleas and died, the fleas jumped onto humans. Two thirds to three quarters of the people who got bitten by said fleas died within a few days. The reason people are not sure that it was bubonic plague is that people knew very little about medicine in the 1300's, and didn't describe the symptoms well enough for modern doctors to identify the disease. Actually, Yersinia pestis was not identified until a bubonic plague epidemic in China in 1894. Alexandre Yersin associated bubonic plague with the medieval plague because of one odd symptom they shared: the big, dark swellings or "buboes" that appeared on victims.
An interesting observation that has lead many scientists that it was not Yersinia pestis that caused the plague is that people alive at the time didn't associate flea bites and dead rats with the disease. Also, rats don't move around a lot, but the black death could cross huge distances in only a few days. Modern bubonic plague spreads only a few miles a year, as opposed to the black death, which got from Southern Italy to Norway in about two years. Furthermore, English burial records from the time suggest that it spread from person to person, not from rats to people. Some historians argue that fleas can survive for several months without a host, so they could have traveled long distances in bales of cloth carried by merchants. Other people say that fleas didn't use rats at all--they just hopped directly from person to person. Some think that the black death was caused by a different form of the bacteria, one in which bacteria live in people's lungs and spread when that person sneezes or coughs. (like a cold) And, there are people who think that it was a very different form of contagious disease--maybe a deadly strain of influenza (the flu) or a virus similar to ebola (a very nasty disease that thankfully is contained in Africa.. unless you already know what it does you don't want to hear). And then there are people who say that it could have been a combination of several different diseases. The debate is still largely unsolved.
I understand if you didn't want to read all that. Thanks for letting me rant.))
~I did read it all. Thank you, now I feel special. 😄 ~