Bubonic plague still occurs throughout the world and in the U.S., with cases in Africa, Asia, South America and the western areas of North America. About seven cases of plague happen in the U.S. every year on average. Half of the U.S. cases involve people aged 12 to 45 years.
The Black Death has also been called the Great Mortality, a term derived from medieval chronicles' use of magna mortalitas. This term, along with magna pestilencia (“great pestilence”), was used in the Middle Ages to refer to what we know today as the Black Death as well as to other outbreaks of disease.
Plague is a rare disease. The illness mostly occurs in only a few countries around the world. In the United States, plague affects a few people each year in rural or semirural areas of western states.
The Black Death (also known as the Pestilence, the Great Mortality or the Plague) was a bubonic plague pandemic occurring in Western Eurasia and North Africa from 1346 to 1353.
The eventual weakening of the pandemic was likely due to the practice of quarantining infected people that originated in Venice in the 15th century and is with us to this day. Improved sanitation, personal hygiene, and medical practices also played a role in ultimately slowing the plague's terror march.
Plague can still be fatal despite effective antibiotics, though it is lower for bubonic plague cases than for septicemic or pneumonic plague cases. It is hard to assess the mortality rate of plague in developing countries, as relatively few cases are reliably diagnosed and reported to health authorities.
It was known as the "Black Death" during the fourteenth century, causing more than 50 million deaths in Europe. Nowadays, plague is easily treated with antibiotics and the use of standard precautions to prevent acquiring infection.
Plague vaccines ** have been used since the late 19th century, but their effectiveness has never been measured precisely. Field experience indicates that vaccination with plague vaccine reduces the incidence and severity of disease resulting from the bite of infected fleas.
Black Death: 75-200M (1334-1353)
Each time, Pharaoh promises to free the Israelites, but reverses his decision when the plague is lifted — until the last one. The plagues are: water turning to blood, frogs, lice, flies, livestock pestilence, boils, hail, locusts, darkness and the killing of firstborn children.
Today, modern antibiotics are effective in treating plague. Without prompt treatment, the disease can cause serious illness or death. Presently, human plague infections continue to occur in rural areas in the western United States, but significantly more cases occur in parts of Africa and Asia.
In October 1347, a ship came from the Crimea and Asia and docked in Messina, Sicily. Aboard the ship were not only sailors but rats. The rats brought with them the Black Death, the bubonic plague. Reports that came to Europe about the disease indicated that 20 million people had died in Asia.
The unceasing flow of sea, river, and road traffic between commercial centers spread the plague across huge distances in what is known as a “metastatic leap.” Big commercial cities were infected first, and from there the plague radiated to nearby towns and villages, from where it would spread into the countryside.
Covid-19 has devastated our world, but there are a few blessings: it very rarely strikes children, and its infection fatality rate — the percentage of those who are infected who die — is much lower than for many other famous plagues. Epidemic diseases like smallpox frequently killed 30 percent of those infected.
The estimated death rate of the Black Death is placed at upwards of 60%, meaning a person who caught the disease at the time had roughly a 40% chance of survival.
In that first wave from 1334-1353 Black Death is believed to have killed 75-200 million people. It went on to kill millions more in frequent outbreaks across the globe in what is called the “Second Plague Pandemic” over 500 years. It wasn't until 1896 that the first effective treatment, antiserum, was discovered.
In the study, Barreiro and his colleagues found that Black Death survivors in London and Denmark had an edge in their genes – mutations that helped protect against the plague pathogen, Yersinia pestis. Survivors passed those mutations onto their descendants, and many Europeans still carry those mutations today.
Specifically, historians have speculated that the fleas on rats are responsible for the estimated 25 million plague deaths between 1347 and 1351. However, a new study suggests that rats weren't the main carriers of fleas and lice that spread the plague—it was humans.
Once a body has died and been buried, plague on a body doesn't last very long, so it doesn't survive well in the ground. "It is not a live bacteria so it doesn't have the potential of spreading infections in the modern world.
The same genetics that helped some of our ancestors fight the plague is still likely to be at work in our bodies today, potentially providing some of the population with extra protection against respiratory diseases such as COVID-19, according to research led by scientists at University of Bristol.
In fact, almost a quarter of all babies in the Middle Ages died within the first year of their life and less than half of all children would reach the age of ten. However, if a child did pass the age of ten, they had a reasonable chance of reaching adulthood and possibly living up to approximately 30 years old.
Life during the Black Death was extremely unpleasant. If you didn't die from the horrible symptoms of the disease, then starving to death was a likely possibility. Because whole villages were wiped out by the Black Death, no one was left to work the land and grow food.