The History of The Black Death

By; Jessica Paternoster

The Bubonic Plague, also known as the Black Death, originated from across the Black Sea. Boats docking in Italian ports carried rats and the rats carried fleas, or the hosts of the disease.

The rats could stay alive with the infection still small. Though when it multiplied the rat died. Then the flea would look for another victim.

In history there were three major outbreaks of the Bubonic Plague. The first one was the Plague of Justine (542-543). It killed 70,000 in Constaniople. At the peak of this outbreak, it killed 10,000 people a week.

Then for 52 years, small outbreaks appeared here and there. The second most devastating outbreak happened in Europe (1346-1360), killing one-third of it's population. Twenty five million people died in those four years.

Third was the Great Plague of London (1665). It's death count went up to 17,440 out of a population of 93,000.

A fire ended that outbreak.

Then there was a small outbreak in Manchuria. That outbreak traveled to San Francisco in 1900.

At the end of these four outbreaks the death toll was 12,597,789. Though after all the outbreaks that have occurred it's taken 137,000,000 lives.

Outbreaks in this decade were not that common. Here are two examples of some that have happened. In 1993 a vet was taking care of one of the regular cats. A few days later she was in the hospital with Pneumonic Plague an extreme version of the Bubonic Plague. Than in 1995, a girl in Utah lost her cat. When it came back she noticed bumps on the back of the cat's neck . She gave the cat a bath. For the next few nights the cat slept with her on the bed before she went to summer camp. While she was at camp she had a kind of seizure. After the doctors examined her it was determined she caught the Bubonic Plague from her cat.

The future of this disease is not for sure yet. All we know is that it occurs more in hot weather and where there are large populations of rodents.

Effective ways to prevent this horrible disease:

control the rat population

insecticides on flea population

sanitary living conditions

patients should be put in isolation immediately

14th century techniques were very , very different:

bath in human urine

put dead animals in home

use leaches

drink molten gold or powdered emeralds

Sources: http://www.village.virginia.edu/osheim/plagueim.html

http://jaguar.joj.hsv.k12.al.us/magnet/bubonic.html

http://ponderosa-pine.uoregon.edu/students/Janis/menu.html

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