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China locks down city of 30k after a man dies of Plague


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Luckily we do have a Plague vaccine. It actually began in China. Do you know that some estimates of the Black Death death toll, during the middle ages, put it as high as 80%? It is believed it caused huge social changes, hastening the end of serfdom in western Europe and seeing to the rise of a new middle 'artisan' class.

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Luckily we do have a Plague vaccine. It actually began in China. Do you know that some estimates of the Black Death death toll, during the middle ages, put it as high as 80%? It is believed it caused huge social changes, hastening the end of serfdom in western Europe and seeing to the rise of a new middle 'artisan' class.

We don't have a plague vaccine, because it isn't a virus, it's a bacterial infection.

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Luckily we do have a Plague vaccine. It actually began in China. Do you know that some estimates of the Black Death death toll, during the middle ages, put it as high as 80%? It is believed it caused huge social changes, hastening the end of serfdom in western Europe and seeing to the rise of a new middle 'artisan' class.

We don't have a plague vaccine, because it isn't a virus, it's a bacterial infection.

Then you best get onto Wiki about this..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_vaccine

Incidentally, I was watching a documentary and, at some unspecified (for obvious reasons) lab in England, there it is, yersinia pestis, in a petri dish. They would not even allow the presenter, that public school chap, Dan Snow, handle the thing with gloves passing into one of those screened-off areas, such is its deadliness.

When the plague broke out in London in the 17th Century, people thought cats and dogs were the culprits, so they were all killed, giving the rats free rein and making the epidemic a whole lot worse.

And Pepys buried his favourite cheese when the Great Fire happened.

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Luckily we do have a Plague vaccine. It actually began in China. Do you know that some estimates of the Black Death death toll, during the middle ages, put it as high as 80%? It is believed it caused huge social changes, hastening the end of serfdom in western Europe and seeing to the rise of a new middle 'artisan' class.

We don't have a plague vaccine, because it isn't a virus, it's a bacterial infection.

Then you best get onto Wiki about this..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_vaccine

Incidentally, I was watching a documentary and, at some unspecified (for obvious reasons) lab in England, there it is, yersinia pestis, in a petri dish. They would not even allow the presenter, that public school chap, Dan Snow, handle the thing with gloves passing into one of those screened-off areas, such is its deadliness.

When the plague broke out in London in the 17th Century, people thought cats and dogs were the culprits, so they were all killed, giving the rats free rein and making the epidemic a whole lot worse.

And Pepys buried his favourite cheese when the Great Fire happened.

I'd love to know if I carry the CCR5-Delta 32 gene which makes you immune to catching the Plague. The only people who came into contact with those already infected and who did not contract any symptoms whatsoever apparently all carried the Delta 32 gene. I really wanna know if I was living in the 17th century in England if I'd have been a goner or not?

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You would not need to go back to 17th century England. There were plague pandemics in mid-late 19th century Russia and China. Also, Napoleon's troops caught the disease in Jaffa 1799 - immortalised in a very famous paining by Antoine-Jean Gros (which I had to study for University incidentally).

800px-Antoine-Jean_Gros_-_Bonaparte_visi

That is a superb bit of propaganda. Notice that Bonaparte is, on the one hand the Son of the Enlightenment (touching the sufferer), and on the other hand, Christ like?

Additionally, the Japanese during WW2 were messing around with the Plague as a biological weapon, injecting prisoners with the pestis for some unfathomable reason.

By the way, did you know that 95% of people are immune from leprosy? Of course they did not know of this in the old days and because the disease caused such visible disfiguration and social stigma that it gained its nasty reputation, but really, you were statistically misfortunate as well as being misfortunate in more obvious ways, merely by contacting the disease in the first place.

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You would not need to go back to 17th century England. There were plague pandemics in mid-late 19th century Russia and China. Also, Napoleon's troops caught the disease in Jaffa 1799 - immortalised in a very famous paining by Antoine-Jean Gros (which I had to study for University incidentally)

I didn't know that, but I am particularly fascinated by the 16th and 17th centuries, that's why I wanted to know if I would have been a victim of the disease or not. I fancy it would have been an interesting period in Europe's history to be alive, but not so appealing knowing that you had relatively little control of contracting a disease that kills you brutally, painfully and gruesomely within days. :D

It's interesting the way the disease has been present in some way, shape or form for all these centuries but has only had momentary periods of serious outbreak where it has wreaked havoc on the worlds population, and then recedes to relatively harmless levels of affect. I can't imagine that hygiene is the sole reason for outbreak since the world has only had proper sewerage, rubbish collection and pest control for the last century or so. Why weren't there devastating outbreaks of the Plague in Paris for instance, before Haussmann had the drains and sewers built underground? The plague existed but it didn't seem to have the tragic affect on the population that it did in other cities over the centuries. Does malnutrition have anything to do with people becoming more susceptible? There were definitely periods of food abundance and food scarcity in Europe over the centuries. Just a thought.

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You cannot beat that era for diseases. There was the dreaded 'Pox' which left your face acne scarred, and, for the wealthy, gout.

The last plague epidemic to hit Western Europe was, Brittany 1741. I think there was an earlier one in Marseille in 1720 which was even bigger. I know the plague followed around the armies during the Great Northern War, in Eastern Europe. Diseases are strange things, occasionally bubbling up and disappearing only to resurface at a later date. Here, rats (which carry the flea vector) are connected. I am not an expert but I suspect it is a series of factors such as, a large containment of grain (to feed a burgeoning rat population), poor sanitation, a heat wave and a close proximity of humans.

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That's interesting. You're probably right, weather conditions often play a part in contagious diseases. For instance, malaria and any mosquito related disease is always common to a warm, humid climate. Rats don't like cold and old buildings are rife with pests. I remember when I lived in Amsterdam I lived in the canal houses. One of them dated from the 17th century and we often had mice inside. You couldn't leave a loaf of bread on the kitchen bench (even in a plastic bag) without mice getting to it because the building was so old and there were so many small holes that they could squeeze through. Aaaagghhh! What a nightmare! And this is with modern building and sealing techniques.

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Also there is the sense that, the Plague simply ran out of hosts. I think this is particularly true for the Middle Ages. Consider the success rate (for lack of a better term) of the Medieval Black Death: even conservative estimates put European casualties at 60%. Now you are going to have deserted town ships, homesteads and manors - the type of environments conducive to Plague outbreaks. Additionally, the few who survived probably did so by isolating themselves from urban environments. In a manner of speaking, the Black Death was too successful. It eradicated its supply of host-vectors.

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