Medical personnel and caregivers must take strict precautions to avoid getting or spreading plague. Plague can lead to gangrene if blood vessels in your fingers and toes disrupt blood flow and cause death to tissue.
In rare cases, plague can cause meningitis, an inflammation of membranes that surround your spinal cord and brain. Keeping the rodent population under control in your home, workplace, and recreation areas can greatly reduce your risk of getting the bacteria that causes plague. Keep your home free from stacks of cluttered firewood or piles of rock, brush, or other debris that could attract rodents.
Protect your pets from fleas using flea control products. Pets that roam freely outdoors may be more likely to come into contact with plague-infected fleas or animals.
The Black Death
If you live in an area where the plague is known to occur, the CDC recommends not allowing pets that roam freely outside to sleep in your bed. If your pet becomes sick, seek care from a veterinarian right away. Use insect repellent products or natural insect repellants like oil of lemon eucalyptus when spending time outdoors. If you have been exposed to fleas during a plague outbreak, visit your doctor immediately so your concerns can be addressed quickly. Epidemics of plague killed millions of people about one-quarter of the population in Europe during the Middle Ages.
It came to be known as the "black death. Today the risk of developing plague is quite low, with only 3, cases and deaths reported to the World Health Organization WHO from to Outbreaks are generally associated with infested rats and fleas in the home. Crowded living conditions and bad sanitation also increase the risk of plague. Today, most human cases of the plague occur in Africa though they do appear elsewhere. The countries in which the plague is most common are Madagascar, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Peru.
The plague is rare in the United States, but the disease is still sometimes found in the rural southwest and, in particular, in Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico.
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The last epidemic of plague in the United States occurred in to in Los Angeles. In the United States, reported cases average seven per year. Most have been in the form of the bubonic plague. Do you know what disease caused the most deaths worldwide?
Catching The Black Death | Science and Technology | BBC World Service
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Signs and symptoms of the plague. What to do if you think you might have the plague. How the plague is diagnosed. Treatment for the plague. Outlook for plague patients. The plague arrived in Europe in October , when 12 ships from the Black Sea docked at the Sicilian port of Messina.
People gathered on the docks were met with a horrifying surprise: Most sailors aboard the ships were dead, and those still alive were gravely ill and covered in black boils that oozed blood and pus. However, Europeans were scarcely equipped for the horrible reality of the Black Death. Blood and pus seeped out of these strange swellings, which were followed by a host of other unpleasant symptoms — fever, chills, vomiting, diarrhea, terrible aches and pains — and then, in short order, death. The Black Death was terrifyingly, indiscriminately contagious: People who were perfectly healthy when they went to bed at night could be dead by morning.
Today, scientists understand that the Black Death, now known as the plague, is spread by a bacillus called Yersina pestis. The French biologist Alexandre Yersin discovered this germ at the end of the 19th century. They know that the bacillus travels from person to person pneumonically, or through the air, as well as through the bite of infected fleas and rats.
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Both of these pests could be found almost everywhere in medieval Europe, but they were particularly at home aboard ships of all kinds — which is how the deadly plague made its way through one European port city after another. Then it reached Rome and Florence, two cities at the center of an elaborate web of trade routes. Today, this grim sequence of events is terrifying but comprehensible. In the middle of the 14th century, however, there seemed to be no rational explanation for it.
No one knew exactly how the Black Death was transmitted from one patient to another, and no one knew how to prevent or treat it. Physicians relied on crude and unsophisticated techniques such as bloodletting and boil-lancing practices that were dangerous as well as unsanitary and superstitious practices such as burning aromatic herbs and bathing in rosewater or vinegar. Meanwhile, in a panic, healthy people did all they could to avoid the sick.
Doctors refused to see patients; priests refused to administer last rites; and shopkeepers closed their stores. Many people fled the cities for the countryside, but even there they could not escape the disease: It affected cows, sheep, goats, pigs and chickens as well as people. In fact, so many sheep died that one of the consequences of the Black Death was a European wool shortage.
And many people, desperate to save themselves, even abandoned their sick and dying loved ones. Because they did not understand the biology of the disease, many people believed that the Black Death was a kind of divine punishment — retribution for sins against God such as greed, blasphemy, heresy, fornication and worldliness.
Some people believed that the way to do this was to purge their communities of heretics and other troublemakers — so, for example, many thousands of Jews were massacred in and Thousands more fled to the sparsely populated regions of Eastern Europe, where they could be relatively safe from the rampaging mobs in the cities.
Some people coped with the terror and uncertainty of the Black Death epidemic by lashing out at their neighbors; others coped by turning inward and fretting about the condition of their own souls. Some upper-class men joined processions of flagellants that traveled from town to town and engaged in public displays of penance and punishment: They would beat themselves and one another with heavy leather straps studded with sharp pieces of metal while the townspeople looked on.
Then they would move on to the next town and begin the process over again. Though the flagellant movement did provide some comfort to people who felt powerless in the face of inexplicable tragedy, it soon began to worry the Pope, whose authority the flagellants had begun to usurp. In the face of this papal resistance, the movement disintegrated.