Bubonic Plague
You feel bad, really bad in fact. Within just a few days you have developed swollen lymph nodes under your arms, around your neck, and in your groin area; you have a severe headache a high fever and the chills; nausea, vomiting and stomach cramps are common; diarrhea is the rule of the day, you have noticed several broken blood vessels on your body, and to top all that off … you hardly have an appetite at all.
If you have the symptoms recited above you may just have a bad case of the flu but then on second thought, you could have the Bubonic Plague and if you do, you’re probably going to die in just a day or two.
Bubonic Plague is primarily transmitted through the bites of infected fleas, lice, or rodents. The bacteria that cause the disease are not typically spread through human-to-human contact. The symptoms described above tend to develop within six days. If left untreated, the mortality rate for bubonic plague is 50 to 90 percent; it drops to 15 percent with early diagnosis and treatment.
The deadly disease known as The Bubonic Plague is generally believed to be the cause of the “Black Death” that swept through Europe in the middle of the 14th century and killed an estimated 75 million people, which was somewhere between 30-60% of the European population of the time. Most historians believe this disease was spread by flea bites. This deadly plague returned at various times afterwards, killing more people as you would expect, but has not been seen in Europe (on a significant scale) since the 19th century.
Current medical scholars think it started in China , then travelled along the ‘Silk Road’ or trade route and reached Eastern Europe in about 1346. From there, it was probably carried by Oriental rat fleas living on the black rats that were regular passengers on merchant ships of the era. The plague then spread throughout Europe .
This plague killed so much of the working population of that era, wages rose and some historians have even determined this event was as a major turning point in regard to European economic development. It took at least 150 years for Europe 's depleted population to recover.
Roughly 10 to 20 people in the United States develop bubonic plague each year from flea or rodent bites -- primarily from infected prairie dogs -- in rural areas of the southwestern United States South America . The World Health Organization (WHO) reports statistics showing a total of 2,118 cases as recently as 2003 worldwide.
If a person develops the disease, early plague treatment offers the best chance for recovery. The good news: there is a vaccine or a cure for bubonic plague but the bad news: it is no longer commercially available in the United States
Sources:
No comments:
Post a Comment