The Plague: The Black Death Epidemic

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Name: Eva Han
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Due Date: November.17.2015

Epidemics One World
Plague-Black Death

The Plague is a bacterial disease that is responsible for many worldwide epidemics in the history. The Black Death (Black Plague) is one of the examples of the plague theory and it is also a catastrophic pandemic that caused death to about 75 to 200 million of the Europe’s population from 1347 to1351 (Random History, 2009). An epidemic is an infectious disease that is spread in a region at a particular time and a pandemic is an epidemic throughout the whole world. (MNT 2014) The Black Death started in Central Asia and travelled down the Silk Road where it was first exposed in Europe. Scientist discovered that the pathogen that causes the plague is the …show more content…
The bacterium Yersinia Pestis, also the bacteria that is responsible for the plague is found in infected fleas that could be found most commonly on rats. The cause of the Black Death was also from rat fleas (Xenopsylla cheopis) therefore by managing the amount of rats in the environment can reduce the chance of someone getting bitten by a flea that may cause plague disease. One method of doing this is by using insecticides, which is a substance that kills insects and could be used when somebody is in places that are more likely exposed to fleas. Always wear protection when handling contaminated or dead animals to prevent disease spreading and regularly eliminate rodents from houses. If someone was already infected by the plague disease, the most often used and most effective modern treatment is antibiotics. (BlackPlague101, 2013) Antibiotics works in two ways, one way is killing the bacteria by interfering with the bacterium’s formation of the cell wall or cell contents, which could also be called bactericidal. The other way is to stop bacteria from reproducing or multiplying, which is called a bacteriostatic. (MNT, 2015) Two of the antibiotics that are used to treat the plague are Streptomycin and …show more content…
It highly reduced the death rate and mortality of people diagnosed with the Plague. As mentioned above, in the mid-late-fourteenth-century the Black Death has killed more than 75 million of people. According to the “World Heath Organization”, only 1000-2000 cases has been reported each year worldwide in recent decades which is also an average of 7 plague cases each year. Furthermore when antibiotics had not been discovered yet (1900-1941), mortality among people with plague disease was 66% in the US. However the overall mortality had decreased to 11% in years 1990-2010 since antibiotics has been discovered. (WHO, 2014) The whole social community may be affected when the morality of the plague is high because most people will be frightened that they could get infected by the plague. This could cause change in daily life routines, for example not willing to go outdoors because people are afraid that there are bacteria outside and there will be a higher chance of the transmission of the plague. Therefore, by using antibiotics, fewer and fewer cases of the plague is reported in recent years The death of a person would most likely impact a particular group of the society which is most often the family members or friends of the dead
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