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Chinese city warns of Black Death risk after case of bubonic plague

A Chinese city has issued an epidemic warning after a local farmer contracted bubonic plague, the virus that caused the Black Death.

The herdsman from the city of Bayan Nur in Inner Mongolia is now reportedly in a stable condition, but the area has been put under a level three warning for epidemic control as a precautionary measure, according to state-run Xinhua news agency.

This warning is the second-lowest in a four-level system, but will stay in place until the end of the year, Xinhua reports. The same area was previously the scene of an outbreak of pneumonic plague in November 2019.

Officials in Bayan Nur are also investigating a second suspected case involving a 15-year-old who had apparently been in contact with a marmot hunted by a dog, the site says.

"At present, there is a risk of a human plague epidemic spreading in this city," the local health authority said, according to the state-run China Daily. "The public should improve its self-protection awareness and ability, and report abnormal health conditions promptly."

But we should not panic about a coronavirus-style outbreak just yet. "The bubonic plague was once the world's most feared disease," says the i newspaper. "However, the disease is now easily treated."

What was the Black Death?

The Black Death was an epidemic of bubonic plague, a disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis that circulates among wild rodents where they live in great numbers and density.

Originating in China, the disease spread west along the trade routes across Europe and arrived on the British Isles from the English province of Gascony. It is believed to have been spread by flea-infected rats, as well as individuals who had been infected on the continent.

Although it was relatively well contained in the Isles, it achieved even greater potency when the virus became airborne as it meant it was more quickly spread from human to human.

In the years between 1346 and 1353, the plague destroyed a higher proportion of the population than any other single known event. One observer noted: "The living were scarcely sufficient to bury the dead," according to History Extra.

Anthony Fauci, head of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told USA Today: "The bubonic and pneumonic plague of the 14th Century... was caused by the bacteria Yersinia pestis, which is still very much alive and well around the world and generally seen in animal populations, and transmitted by the bite of a flea.

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How did it end?

The most popular theory of how the plague ended is through the implementation of quarantines. The uninfected would typically remain in their homes and only leave when it was necessary, while those who could afford to do so would leave the more densely populated areas and live in greater isolation.

Improvements in personal hygiene are also thought to have begun to take place during the pandemic, alongside the practice of cremations rather than burials due to the sheer number of bodies.

A common myth suggests that the plagues' third epidemic was finally wiped out in London by the Great Fire of 1666.

It's a good story, but sadly not true, says the Museum of London.

The number of people dying from the plague was already in decline before the fire, and people continued to die after it had been extinguished.

What is the Black Death's legacy?

"A historical turning point, as well as a vast human tragedy, the Black Death of 1346-53 is unparalleled in human history," says Ole J Benedictow at History Today.

It would take 200 years before Europe alone was able to replenish its population to pre-plague numbers. In addition to population losses, the world also suffered monumental setbacks in terms of labour, art, culture and the economy.

Where does the Black Death still exist?

From 2010 to 2015, there were 3,248 cases of the plague reported worldwide, resulting in 584 deaths, says the World Health Organisation.

Plague can still be found on all continents, except Oceania. There is a risk of human plague wherever the bacteria, an animal carrier and human population co-exist.

It is most common in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Madagascar and Peru, and epidemics have occurred in Africa, Asia and South America. Since the 1990s, most human cases have occurred in Africa, says the WHO.

Madagascar is known for being home to the disease, and cases of bubonic plague are reported nearly every year in the country. Last year, a number cats in Wyoming, USA, were discovered with the plague, prompting warnings from state officials, says Pacific Standard magazine.

What can it teach us about coronavirus?

Serious plague outbreaks are confined to history, and the distant past is not our best source for educating current health officials on the science of virus containment.

But there are lessons to be learned from the plague on how we guard against xenophobia and persecution during outbreaks of disease. Already Europe has seen populists attempt to exploit the spread of coronavirus to call for closed borders.

Italy's far-right politician Matteo Salvini called for "armour-plated" borders, while Germany's far-right AfD has said the spread of the virus is down to the "dogma of the open border".

Anti-migrant sentiment is being stoked by the far-right and fears over the coronavirus. The Italian government quarantined 276 migrants rescued off the coast of Libya last week, despite them having had no connection to people or locations affected by the coronavirus.

Economic woes also go hand-in-hand with major pandemics. Last week, the Financial Times reported that the UK's economy could shrink by 6.5% this year in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak. Citing a report by Deutsche Bank, the paper notes that the British economy contracted by a staggering 23.5% in 1349, at the height of the Black Death. The report notes that even the annual contraction after the financial crisis in 2009 - the largest since the Second World War - was "only" -4.2%.

However, Andy Mukherjee of Bloomberg News says it is "impossible to predict if the virus will inject a welcome impatience into spending out of pay checks that are augmented by state support, or whether the global economy will get mired in deeper stagnation", adding: "A disease that's especially harsh on older people could alter global demographics, with as-yet-unpredictable consequences for pension savings and asset demand."

He adds that the borrowing costs for large monarchies fell to 8%-10% by the early 16th century from 20%-30% before the Black Death, while "Florence, Venice and Genoa as well as cities in Germany and Holland saw rates slump to 4% from 15%".

Writing of coronavirus: "Even if 1% of infections prove to have been fatal by the time the coronavirus is contained, the disease would likely cast a lasting shadow on behavior, preferences, prices... and yes, interest rates."

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What was the Black Death and when did it end? | The Week UK

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Chinese city warns of Black Death risk after case of bubonic plague A Chinese city has issued an epidemic warning after a local farmer contracted bubonic plague, the virus that caused the Black Death.

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"People who were perfectly healthy when they went to bed at night could be dead by morning."

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Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Black Death and the way medieval communities responded to it.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss how the Black Death influenced the structure and ideas of Medieval Europe. In October 1347, a Genoese trading ship arrived at the busy port of Messina in Sicily and docked among many similar ships doing similar things. But this ship was special because this ship had rats and the rats had fleas and the fleas had plague. This was the Black Death and its terrible progress was captured by the Florentine writer Giovanni Boccaccio who declared "in those years a dead man was then of no more account than a dead goat". In the long and unsanitary history of Europe there have been many plagues but only one Black Death. It killed over a third of Europe's population in 4 years - young and old, rich and poor, in the town and in the country. When it stopped in 1351 it left a continent ravaged but transformed - the poor found their labour to be valuable, religion was both reinforced and undercut, medicine progressed, art changed and the continent awash with guilt and memorialisation. With Miri Rubin, Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at Queen Mary, University of London; Samuel Cohn, Professor of Medieval History at the University of Glasgow; Paul Binski, Professor of the History of Medieval Art at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge

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BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Black Death

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Melvyn Bragg and guests examine the Black Death and its effect on medieval society.

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Unique, sensational and shocking, this revelatory book provides the best overview of the Europe-wide history of the Black Death. The author's painstakingly comprehensive research throws fresh light on the nature of the disease, its origin, its spread, on an almost day-to-day basis, across Europe, Asia Minor, the Middle East and North Africa, its mortality rate and its impact on history. These latter two aspects are of central importance here, for it is demonstrated that the plague's death rates have consistently been under-estimated and that they were in fact much higher, making the disease's long-term effects on history even more profound. First paperback edition published 2006. OLE J. BENEDICTOW is Professor of History at the University of Oslo.

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Unique, sensational and shocking, this revelatory book provides the best overview of the Europe-wide history of the Black Death. The author's painstakingly comprehensive research throws fresh light on the nature of the disease, its origin, its spread, on an almost day-to-day basis, across Europe, Asia Minor, the Middle East and North Africa, its mortality rate and its impact on history.

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"Through the implementation of quarantines. The uninfected would typically remain in their homes and only leave when it was necessary, while those who could afford to do so would leave the more densely populated areas and live in greater isolation."
https://www.theweek.co.uk/76088/what-was-black-death-and-how-did-it-end#:~:text=How%20did%20it%20end%3F,and%20live%20in%20greater%20isolation.

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Killed more than 20 million people in Europe—almost one-third of the continent’s population.

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Killed more than 20 million people in Europe—almost one-third of the continent’s population.

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https://www.history.com/topics/middle-ages/black-death

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A couple suffering from the blisters of the Black Death, the bubonic plague that swept through Europe in the Middle Ages. From the Swiss manuscript the Toggenburg Bible, 1411.

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The consequences of this violent catastrophe were many. A cessation of wars and a sudden slump in trade immediately followed but were only of short duration. A more lasting and serious consequence was the drastic reduction of the amount of land under cultivation, due to the deaths of so many labourers. This proved to be the ruin of many landowners. The shortage of labour compelled them to substitute wages or money rents in place of labour services in an effort to keep their tenants. There was also a general rise in wages for artisans and peasants. These changes brought a new fluidity to the hitherto rigid stratification of society.

The psychological effects of the Black Death were reflected north of the Alps (not in Italy) by a preoccupation with death and the afterlife evinced in poetry, sculpture, and painting; the Roman Catholic Church lost some of its monopoly over the salvation of souls as people turned to mysticism and sometimes to excesses.

Anti-Semitism greatly intensified throughout Europe as Jews were blamed for the spread of the Black Death. A wave of violent pogroms ensued, and entire Jewish communities were killed by mobs or burned at the stake en masse.

The economy of Siena received a decisive check. The city's population was so diminished that the project of enlarging the cathedral was abandoned, and the death of many great painters, such as Ambrogio and Pietro Lorenzetti, brought the development of the first Sienese school to a premature end.

In England the immediate effects of the epidemic of 1349 seem to have been of short duration, and the economic decline which reached its nadir in the mid-15th century should probably be attributed rather to the pandemic recurrence of the plague.

The study of contemporary archives suggests a mortality varying in the different regions between one-eighth and two-thirds of the population, and the French chronicler Jean Froissart's statement that about one-third of Europe's population died in the epidemic may be fairly accurate. The population in England in 1400 was perhaps half what it had been 100 years earlier; in that country alone, the Black Death certainly caused the depopulation or total disappearance of about 1,000 villages. A rough estimate is that 25 million people in Europe died from plague during the Black Death. The population of western Europe did not again reach its pre-1348 level until the beginning of the 16th century.
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

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Black Death - Plague, Mortality, Europe: It is estimated that 25 million people, or about a third of the population, died in Europe from plague during the pandemic. This massive loss of life led to many changes, including much less land under cultivation, greater social mobility, and a rise in violent anti-Semitism because Jews were blamed for the plague.

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"The plague arrived in Europe in October 1347, when 12 ships from the Black Sea docked at the Sicilian port of Messina"
https://www.history.com/topics/middle-ages/black-death#section_1

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The Black Death was a devastating global epidemic of bubonic plague that struck Europe and Asia in the mid-1300s. Explore the facts of the plague, the symptoms it caused and how millions died from it.

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One of the haunting images of this pandemic will be stationary cruise ships - deadly carriers of COVID-19 - at anchor in harbours and unwanted. Docked in ports and feared.

The news of the dramatic spread of the virus on the Diamond Princess from early February made the news real for many Australians who'd enjoyed holidays on the seas. Quarantined in Yokohama, Japan, over 700 of the ship's crew and passengers became infected. To date, 14 deaths have been recorded.

The Diamond Princess's sister ship, the Ruby Princess, brought the pandemic to Australian shores. Now under criminal investigation, the events of the Ruby Princess forced a spotlight on the petri dish cruise ships can become. The ship has been linked to 21 deaths.

History shows the devastating role ships can play in transmitting viruses across vast continents and over many centuries.

Read more: This could be the end of the line for cruise ships

Rats in the ranks

Merchant ships carrying rats with infected fleas were transmitters of the Plague of Justinian (541-542 AD) that devastated the Byzantine Empire.

Ships carrying grain from Egypt were home to flea-infested rats that fed off the granaries. Contantinople was especially inflicted, with estimates as high as 5,000 casualties a day. Globally, up to 50 million people are estimated to have been killed - half the world's population.

The Black Death was also carried by rats on merchant ships through the trade routes of Europe. It struck Europe in 1347, when 12 ships docked at the Sicilian port of Messina.

Subsequently called "death ships", those on board were either dead or sick. Soon, the Black Death spread to ports around the world, such as Marseilles, Rome and Florence, and by 1348 had reached London with devastating impact.

The Italian writer, poet and scholar, Giovanni Boccaccio, wrote how terror swept through Florence with relatives deserting infected family members. Almost inconceivably, he wrote, "fathers and mothers refused to nurse their own children, as though they did not belong to them".

Ships started being turned away from European ports in 1347. Venice was the first city to close, with those permitted to enter forced into a 40-day quarantine: the word "quarantine" derives from the Italian quarantena, or 40 days.

By January 1349, mass graves proliferated outside of London to bury the increasing numbers of dead.

Read more: This isn't the first global pandemic, and it won't be the last. Here's what we've learned from 4 others throughout history

Army and naval ships, as well as travellers around the globe, also carried cholera pandemics throughout the 19th century. In the first pandemic in 1817, British army and navy ships are believed to have spread cholera beyond India where the outbreaks originated.

By the 1820s, cholera had spread throughout Asia, reaching Thailand, Indonesia, China and Japan through shipping. British troops spread it to the Persian Gulf, eventually moving through Turkey and Syria.

Subsequent outbreaks from the 1820s through to the 1860s relied on trade and troops to spread the disease across continents.

At war with the Spanish Flu

The Spanish influenza of 1918-1919 was originally carried by soldiers on overcrowded troop ships during the first world war. The rate of transmission on these ships was rapid, and soldiers died in large numbers.

One New Zealand rifleman wrote in his diary in September 1918:

More deaths and burials total now 42. A crying shame but it is only to be expected when human beings are herded together the way they have been on this boat.

The flu was transmitted throughout Europe in France, Great Britain, Italy and Spain. Three-quarters of French troops and over half of British troops fell ill in 1918. Hundreds of thousands of US soldiers travelling on troop ships across the Atlantic and back provided the perfect conditions for transmission.

The fate of cruising

A new and lethal carrier in the 21st century has emerged in the pleasure industry of cruise ships. The explosion of cruise holidays in the past 20 years has led to a proliferation of luxury liners plying the seas.

Like historical pandemics, the current crisis shares the characteristic of rapid spread through ships.

The unknown is in what form cruise ships will continue to operate. Unlike the port-to-port trade and armed forces that carried viruses across continents centuries ago, the services cruise lines offer are non-essential.

Whatever happens, the global spread of COVID-19 reminds us "death ships" are an enduring feature of the history of pandemics.

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Fleas to flu to coronavirus: how 'death ships' spread disease through the ages

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One of the haunting images of this pandemic will be stationary cruise ships - deadly carriers of COVID-19 - at anchor in harbours and unwanted. Docked in ports and feared. The news of the dramatic spread of the virus on the Diamond Princess from early February made the news real for many Australians who'd enjoyed holidays on the seas.

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Oriental rat flea, primary vector for the transmission of the bacterium Yersinia pestis between rats and humans.

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"The Black Death was a devastating global epidemic of bubonic plague that struck Europe and Asia in the mid-1300s."
https://www.history.com/topics/middle-ages/black-death#section_1

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COVID-19: Is it the black death of the 21st century?

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The estimation of future incidence of COVID-19 seems impossible, as several thousands of new cases and dozens of losses are preserved every day in an unpredictable way. The administrations must perceive and imply precise safety agendas, and conclude how to enhance and enforce the current countrywide strategies against COVID-19 pandemic as soon as possible.

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The plague was once the most feared disease in the world, capable of wiping out hundreds of millions of people in seemingly unstoppable global pandemics and afflicting its victims with painfully swollen lymph nodes, blackened skin, and other gruesome symptoms.

In 17th-century Europe, the physicians who tended to plague victims wore a costume that has since taken on sinister overtones: they covered themselves head to toe and wore a mask with a long bird-like beak. The reason behind the beaked plague masks was a misconception about the very nature of the dangerous disease.

During that period's outbreaks of the bubonic plague-a pandemic that recurred in Europe for centuries-towns gripped by the disease hired plague doctors who practiced what passed for medicine on rich and poor residents alike. These physicians prescribed what were believed to be protective concoctions and plague antidotes, witnessed wills, and performed autopsies-and some did so while wearing beaked masks.

The costume is usually credited to Charles de Lorme, a physician who catered to the medical needs of many European royals during the 17th century, including King Louis XIII and Gaston d'Orléans, son of Marie de Médici. He described an outfit that included a coat covered in scented wax, breeches connected to boots, a tucked-in shirt, and a hat and gloves made of goat leather. Plague doctors also carried a rod that allowed them to poke (or fend off) victims.

Their head gear was particularly unusual: Plague doctors wore spectacles, de Lorme continued, and a mask with a nose "half a foot long, shaped like a beak, filled with perfume with only two holes, one on each side near the nostrils, but that can suffice to breathe and carry along with the air one breathes the impression of the [herbs] enclosed further along in the beak."

Though plague doctors across Europe wore these outfits, the look was so iconic in Italy that the "plague doctor" became a staple of Italian commedia dell'arte and carnival celebrations-and is still a popular costume today. ( Memories of the plague resonate in Venice during the coronavirus pandemic.)

But the forbidding ensemble was not just a deathly fashion statement: It was intended to protect the doctor from miasma. In the times before the germ theory of disease, physicians believed that the plague spread through poisoned air that could create an imbalance in a person's humors, or bodily fluids. Sweet and pungent perfumes were thought to be able to fumigate plague-stricken areas and protect the smeller; nosegays, incense, and other perfumes were common in the era.

Plague doctors filled their masks with theriac, a compound of more than 55 herbs and other components like viper flesh powder, cinnamon, myrrh, and honey. De Lorme thought the beak shape of the mask would give the air sufficient time to be suffused by the protective herbs before it hit plague doctors' nostrils and lungs.

In fact, plague is caused by Yersinia pestis, bacteria that can be transmitted from animals to humans and through flea bites, contact with contaminated fluid or tissue, and inhalation of infectious droplets from sneezing or coughing people with pneumonic plague.

Three horrific plague pandemics swept across the globe before its cause was ultimately uncovered-the Plague of Justinian, which killed up to 10,000 people a day circa A.D. 561; the Black Death, which wiped out up to a third of Europeans between 1334 and 1372 and continued with intermittent outbreaks as late as 1879; and the Third Pandemic, which ravaged much of Asia between 1894 and 1959. ( What is a pandemic-and why does it matter?)

Ultimately, the plague doctors' outfits-and methods-didn't make much of a difference. "Unfortunately," writes historian Frank M. Snowden, "the therapeutic strategies of early modern plague doctors did little to prolong life, relieve suffering, or effect a cure."

Plague doctors may have been immediately recognizable, but until the rise of the germ theory of disease and modern antibiotics, their costumes didn't provide real protection against the disease.

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Why plague doctors wore those strange beaked masks

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In the 17th century, people believed these outfits could purify poisonous air. They were wrong.