Black+Death

The Black Death, also known as "the Plague" or "the Pestilence", was a disease that spread through Europe in the mid 1300s, and it kept on returing at least once every few years. It originated in central Asia, and it wiped out a third of Europe's population, which was about 25,000 people in four years. The Black Death was another name for the bubonic plaque. Some of the symptoms were black boils under the arms, headaches, and high fever. There was also a pneumonic form of the Plague. It was a lot deadlier and attacked the lungs. People said that one could go to bed perfectly healthy and be dead of the Plague by the next morning. During the time of the plague, the economy weakened because skilled workers were dying. The Black Death was brought to Europe by infected fleas that fed on rats' blood. When the rats died, the fleas found new "hosts": humans. The bacteria that caused the Plague was called //Yersinia pestis//. There was no effective treatment until the 1940's, when antibiotics were discovered. Even so, the antibiotics only made the Plague as powerful as the common flu. Each day around 800 people died of the Plague in the city of Paris. People truly thought that the plague was bringing the world to an end. It came back ten years after it had gone. Ironically, it ended up back in central Asia in the same year it died out - 1351.

Works Cited:

Byrne, Joseph P. "Black Death" __World Book Student,__ 2009.