The starving flea then bites its host, by now probably a new, healthy rat or a person, more aggressively in an attempt to feed. After about two weeks, the bacteria block the valve that opens into the flea's stomach. Once a flea bites a rat infected with plague, the pathogen Y. You can't catch bubonic plague from another person instead, the process involves two classic villains: rats and fleas. This wave of devastation becomes particularly surprising considering the complicated and time-consuming process by which plague has been thought to spread. The disease traveled with the Italian traders and later appeared in Sicily, according to Samuel Cohn, a professor of medieval history at the University of Glasglow and author of "The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture in the Early Renaissance Europe" (Bloomsbury USA, 2003).īy about 1352, roughly five years after arriving in Europe, it had not only spread across the continent, the worst of the disease had already run its course. The disease that caused the Black Death is believed to have traveled much quicker, arriving in Europe from Asia in 1347, after the Golden Horde, a Mongol Army, catapulted plague-infected bodies into a Genoese settlement near the Black Sea. The modern plague pandemic began in the Yunnan Province of China in the mid-19th century, then spread to Hong Kong and then via ship, to India, where it exacted the heaviest toll, and to San Francisco in 1899, among many other places. One problem, however, is that compared to the wildfire-like spread of the Black Death, the modern plague moves more leisurely. Yersin also connected his discovery to the pestilence that swept Europe during the Black Death, an association that has stuck. Years later the bacterium was given his name. In 1894, Alexander Yersin and another scientist separately identified Y. Their first suspect: Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes modern plague, including bubonic plague.
"Essentially by looking at the literature on the Black Death there were several candidates for what could have been the cause," said Sharon DeWitte, one of the researchers who is now an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of South Carolina.
0 kommentar(er)
