File :-(, x, )
Black Plague Anonymous
I have been obssessed with this bacteria since I was a child.

Copypaste

Usually the cause of the Black Death is attributed to Bubonic plague - a disease of rats transmitted to humans by fleas. The fleas bite infected rats and then bite humans, infecting them in turn. The flea is xenopsylla cheopis, the oriental flea, which feeds on the blood of mice, rats (especially the black rat, rattus rattus) guinea pigs, dogs and rabbits. The organism is Yersinia pestis, a rod-shaped bacteria named in honour of Alexander Yersin, a French bacteriologist who successfully isolated the bacteria in Hong Kong in 1894.

In 2001, scientists at the Sanger Centre, Cambridge, UK succeded in mapping the entire genome - the genetic map - of Yersonia for the first time.


They discovered that Yersinia Pestis was originally a harmless bacterium found in the stomach of rats. About 1500 years ago, it worked out how to insert genes from other bacteria and viruses into its genome which allowed it to enter the rat's bloodstream.

This was bad news for the rat and for other hosts, including humans, because it became much more virulent, in other words dangerous. When the flea bit a human, depositing Yersinia into human tissues, the bacteria could travel inside white blood cells to nearby lymph nodes where it could multiply, causing the lymph nodes to swell and suppurate (form pus). It could then escape into the bloodstream and spread to other organs of the body, overwhelming and killing its host in 30 - 50 percent of cases.
>> Anonymous
Bubonic plague became endemic wherever black rats and fleas lived which was mainly ports and rural villages in temperate climates. As people moved about, it spread. The black rat is a good climber and likes to feed on grain in the cargoes of ships, and that way it travelled to new ports and spread and infected the rat population of a new destination.


So during the Age of Empires and the Middle Ages, as trade advanced, it spread from the Levant to the ports of the Mediterranean. The last wave of epidemics coincided with the invention of the railways and the steam ship around the turn of the century which gave the black rat the chance to find new destinations. Epidemics broke out in California, South America, South Africa, and in 1900, Australia, where it invaded the Rocks area of Sydney and from there spread up and down the east coast. Today it's endemic in parts of Africa and Asia, where, according to the World Health Organisation, it kills about 3000 people each year.
>> Anonymous
Sounds like a party!
>> Anonymous
     File :-(, x)
great plague carrier, or greatest plague carrier?
>> Anonymous
Did anyone else see the PBS special about immunity to the plague?

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/case_plague/
>> Anonymous
Some delicious copypasta:

"The true nature of the "Black Death" was long a mystery, but early in the 20th Century, after doctors had found and described bubonic plague in India, experts jumped to the conclusion that a more virulent form of that disease, endemic in rats and transmitted to humans by their fleas, was the real culprit.

This was a comforting conclusion, because it meant it was a bacterial disease with a complicated life cycle, easily contained by hygiene and antibiotics. But it never actually made sense, because the standard treatment for the Black Death, tried and tested over three hundred years, was to quarantine affected families and villages for forty days. That could not have worked if it were carried by rats, which

do not respect quarantines. So two years ago Professors Christopher Duncan and Susan Scott of Liverpool University suggested in their book, Biology of Plagues, that the Black Death was really an Ebola like virus, a haemorrhagic fever transmitted directly from person to person. It is frighteningly plausible. The plague called the Black Death appeared in Mongolia in the 1320s, and killed two-thirds of China's population. It reached Europe in 1347, and killed between 30 and 40% of the population in the first onslaught.

The aching, the bleeding from internal organs, the red blotches on the skin were all typical of Ebola style fevers. Besides, bubonic plague, unlike the Black Death, did not disappear. There was an outbreak of bubonic plague in Glasgow in the 1890s. If Duncan and Scott are right there is a virus out there somewhere trying out mutations that might break through human genetic defences evolved to defeat it last time, which could kill a significant portion of the human race in a year. The Black Death is not dead, it's only sleeping."

In other words, OP may have been obsessed with the wrong pathogen.
>> Anonymous
>>59923
OMG

I was? Thanks for the info. I'll do more research.

Also, /an/ needs more germs/virus/bacteria discussions. Talking about fluffy wabbits is hardly any stimulating.
>> Anonymous
Would someone please upload art about the black death? HR if possible?