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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.
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