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Plague is one of the deadliest diseases in human history, second only to smallpox. A bacterial infection found mainly in rodents and associated fleas, plague readily leaps to humans in close contact. Plague outbreaks are the most notorious epidemics in history, inciting fears of plague's use as a biological weapon.

Today, plague cases still pop up sporadically around the world-including in the United States or China, where a suspected case was recently reported in the Inner Mongolia region. But the disease is no longer as deadly as it can be treated with antibiotics when available.

Here's what you need to know about the plague, including how it spreads, the difference between bubonic and pneumonic plague, the most infamous plague pandemics in history, and why it's not all that unusual to see modern cases of the disease.

Stages of plague

For hundreds of years, what caused plague outbreaks remained mysterious, and shrouded in superstitions. But keen observations and advances in microscopes eventually helped unveil the true culprit. In 1894, Alexandre Yersin discovered the bacterium responsible for causing plague: Yersinia pestis.

Y. pestis is an extraordinarily virulent, rod-shaped bacterium. Y. pestis disables the immune system of its host by injecting toxins into defense cells, such as macrophages, that are tasked with detecting bacterial infections. Once these cells are knocked out, the bacteria can multiply unhindered.

Many small mammals act as hosts to the bacteria, including rats, mice, chipmunks, prairie dogs, rabbits, and squirrels. During an enzootic cycle, Y. pestis can circulate at low rates within populations of rodents, mostly undetected because it doesn't produce an outbreak. When the bacteria pass to other species, during an epizootic cycle, humans face a greater risk for becoming infected with plague bacteria.

Rats have long been thought to be the main vector of plague outbreaks, because of their intimate connection with humans in urban areas. Scientists have more recently discovered that a flea that lives on rats, Xenopsylla cheopis, primarily causes human cases of plague. When rodents die from the plague, fleas jump to a new host, biting them and transmitting Y. pestis. Transmission also occurs by handling tissue or blood from a plague-infected animal, or inhalation of infected droplets.

Bubonic plague, the disease's most common form, refers to telltale buboes-painfully swollen lymph nodes-that appear around the groin, armpit, or neck. The skin sores become black, leading to its nickname during pandemics as "Black Death." Initial symptoms of this early stage include vomiting, nausea, and fever.

Pneumonic plague, the most infectious type, is an advanced stage of plague that moves into the lungs. During this stage, the disease is passed directly, person to person, through airborne particles coughed from an infected person's lungs.

If untreated, bubonic and pneumonic plague can progress to septicemic plague, infecting the bloodstream. If left untreated, pneumonic and septicemic plague kills almost 100 percent of those it infects.

Infamous plagues

Three particularly well-known pandemics occurred before the cause of plague was discovered. The first well-documented crisis was the Plague of Justinian, which began in 542 A.D. Named after the Byzantine emperor Justinian I, the pandemic killed up to 10,000 people a day in Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul, Turkey), according to ancient historians. Modern estimates indicate half of Europe's population-almost 100 million deaths-was wiped out before the plague subsided in the 700s.

Arguably the most infamous plague outbreak was the so-called Black Death, a multi-century pandemic that swept through Asia and Europe. It was believed to start in China in 1334, spreading along trade routes and reaching Europe via Sicilian ports in the late 1340s. The plague killed an estimated 25 million people, almost a third of the continent's population. The Black Death lingered on for centuries, particularly in cities. Outbreaks included the Great Plague of London (1665-66), in which 70,000 residents died.

The cause of plague wasn't discovered until the most recent global outbreak, which started in China in 1860 and didn't officially end until 1959. The pandemic caused roughly 10 million deaths. The plague was brought to North America in the early 1900s by ships, and thereafter spread to small mammals throughout the United States.

The high rate of fatality during these pandemics meant that the dead were often buried in quickly dug mass graves. From teeth of these plague victims, scientists have pieced together a family tree of Y. pestis, discovering that the strain from the Justinian Plague was related to, but distinct from, other strains of the plague. ( Read how modern plague strains descended from a strain that arose during the Black Death pandemic.)

Plague in modern society

Plague still exists in various parts of the world, popping up sporadically and followed actively by the World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Most cases have appeared in Africa since the 1990s.

Between 2004 to 2014, the Democratic Republic of the Congo reported the majority of plague cases worldwide, with 4,630 human cases and 349 deaths. Scientists link the prevalence of plague in the Democratic Republic of Congo to the ecosystem-primarily mountain tropical climate. More recently, plague broke out in Madagascar in 2017, causing more than 2,300 cases.

The United States, China, India, Vietnam, and Mongolia are among the other countries that have had confirmed human plague cases in recent years. Within the U.S., on average seven human cases of plague appear each year, emerging primarily in California and the Southwest.

Today, most people survive plague with rapid diagnosis and antibiotic treatment. Good sanitation practices and pest control minimize contact with infected fleas and rodents to help prevent plague pandemics.

Plague is classified as a Category A pathogen, because it readily passes between people and could result in high mortality rates if untreated. This classification has helped stoke fears that Y. pestis could be used as a biological weapon if distributed in aerosol form. As a small airborne particle it would cause pneumonic plague, the most lethal and contagious form.

Of conservation concern, federally endangered black-footed ferrets contract another form of the plague, sylvatic plague, from nearby prairie dogs. Plague can decimate prairie dog populations, which are a critical food source for black-footed ferrets. Scientists have started to administer a vaccine to prevent plague outbreaks in prairie dogs and black-footed ferrets.

This story has been updated. It was originally published on August 20, 2019.

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Plague (Black Death) bacterial infection information and facts

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Known as the Black Death, the much feared disease spread quickly for centuries, killing millions. The bacterial infection still occurs but can be treated with antibiotics.

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World War I, or the Great War, embroiled the globe in bloody fighting from 1914 to 1918. Learn about the complex alliances that led dozens of countries to go to war, how the war was won, and what life was like for soldiers and civilians.

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For full functionality of this site it is necessary to enable JavaScript. Click here for instructions on how to enable JavaScript in your web browser. World War I, or the Great War, embroiled the globe in bloody fighting from 1914 to 1918.

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Kids Are Making a Difference In the World: The Real Story of Gabriel by Anand Mishra

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Kids Are Making a Difference In the World: The Real Story of Gabriel by Anand Mishra

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“Nine stories made by and about young people making a difference” by Leah Clapman

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“Nine stories made by and about young people making a difference” by Leah Clapman

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Nine stories made by and about young people making a difference

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Teen producers find and tell stories of young people making a difference in their communities for this special PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs feature.

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How do cancer cells behave differently from healthy ones? - George Zaidan

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How do cancer cells behave differently from healthy ones? - George Zaidan

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video

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How do cancer cells behave differently from healthy ones? - George Zaidan

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“E-waste Youth Activist” by Living on Earth

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“E-waste Youth Activist” by Living on Earth

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Audio linked in article

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Alex Lin (Courtesy of Alex Lin) Living on Earth interviews Alex Lin, who won the Brower Youth Award for his pioneering work on electronic waste. Lin recycled and refurbishes computers for kids in the U.S. and around the world.
Transcript

CURWOOD: One kid who needs no New Year's resolutions on the environment is 14-year-old Alex Lin. When he was 11 he came across a newspaper article about the massive piles of E-waste-that's waste from electronics and computers that's generated around the world.

When the electronic devices we use every day get taken apart or dumped, toxic substances, like lead, leech into the environment. Alex decided to attack E-waste, starting at home. He founded WIN - Westerly Innovations Network (named after his town of Westerly, Rhode Island).

And this year he received the prestigious Brower Youth Award for young environmental leaders. Alex Lin, welcome to Living on Earth.

LIN: Thanks a lot.

CURWOOD: So one day you're reading the newspaper. You see this article about E-waste and you decide to do something about it. What was it that grabbed you? What made you decide to make this your mission?

LIN: I think what helped me choose to do this was that it's such a little known problem, really. When we started our project in our town, like, when we found out how many people knew about it, it was just less than 15 percent. It was like, ten percent or so of residents even knew what E-waste was, so I mean, just the fact that it's so little known and that by raising awareness we could just do so much to help it. That kind of grabbed our attention when we started the project.

CURWOOD: So how many computers are you guys recycling?

LIN: Recycling-wise we're not really sure about the amount. We just kind of hear back from CR2 Recycling because they weigh the trucks and they let us know how much we've been recycling every month or so. Because whenever a container fills up, the people at the transportation station they call them and they'll send down a truck to bring it to the facility in Massachusetts.

CURWOOD: So it's what-5,000 pounds a month or something like that?

LIN: Something like that. I mean it varies between month and month. I mean, some months it's like 25 hundred, some months it's a lot more. It all depends.

CURWOOD: Now you're working internationally. You've taken the whole thing that you started in Westerly, Rhode Island and you've taken it to people around the world. How's that working?

LIN: Yeah, it's working really well right now. Right now one of our contacts and friends in Cameroon-Rosemary-and she's been helping us to establish WIN teams in Africa and she's been looking around in Kenya, Tanzania, Cameroon. Right now we have two definite set-up WIN teams in Kenya and Cameroon and the rest are on the way. And she's also helped us a lot by looking for schools that need computers so that computers in the U.S. used by companies in large numbers can be reused and sent to people across the world who really need these computers to help better their lives. And we have a Mexican WIN team who's raising awareness. And right now I think Rosemary's been talking with a team in the UK about starting a group there and we're just kind of dealing with it as it comes because it's been coming pretty fast for the past couple of months. But we're going to have to do the work and we're ready to do it, I guess.

CURWOOD: Hey, Alex. Can you tell me a story of where you know one of your computers helped change somebody's life?

LIN: Yeah, I definitely have a pretty good one that we did. You know, after the tsunami in 2004 there was a lot of shortages of computers, learning equipment, schools, teachers. We actually had a local pediatrician from our area-she went to Malaysia and Sri Lanka I think at the time to help out and she met an English teacher there and he contacted us saying there's a need for computers over there and we ended up sending five computers and a laptop. And it was really cool because he sent us some pictures afterward of the children singing to like Barney software and other educational stuff that we put on there and afterwards they named the school the WIN learning center after our team and that was just like really cool that we could have such an impact on the other side of the world.

CURWOOD: By the way, how do you find the time to do all this work on top of what-homework, sports, piano, and well, let's face it, being a kid?

LIN: Yeah. I don't know. It kind of just depends. Like it's more of a-I remember one of my friends I met at Brower in Boston-Carlos. He said it's more of a lifestyle and I totally agree with him. Environmental justice community work is like a lifestyle. You kind of incorporate time to do it into every day and if not every day, definitely on a regular basis because I mean, sure there are times where I would have projects, reports, tests the next day. Or, even sports games and stuff that I need to get with, but usually I'm able to find time during the week to do the work.

CURWOOD: Alex Lin's organization is called WIN, Westerly Innovations Network. Alex received the prestigious Brower Youth Award for young environmental leaders. Congratulations Alex, and thank you so much for taking this time.

LIN: Thanks a lot, Steve.

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Living on Earth / World Media Foundation / Public Radio International

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Living on Earth interviews Alex Lin, who won the Brower Youth Award for his pioneering work on electronic waste. Lin recycled and refurbishes computers for kids in the U.S. and around the world.

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Cell vs. virus: A battle for health - Shannon Stiles

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Cell vs. virus: A battle for health - Shannon Stiles

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video

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Cell vs. virus: A battle for health - Shannon Stiles

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“Why Don’t Men Volunteer as Much as Women?” by Dan Kopf

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“Why Don’t Men Volunteer as Much as Women?” by Dan Kopf

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Though Olivia Bryant, the CEO of YCore, had observed the gender gap at other nonprofits, she was still surprised at the discrepancy. She knew women often dominated volunteer spaces, but 95%? The YCore team set to work to recruit men, and they have since increased the proportion of applications from men to about 25%.

So are women just the more altruistic sex? Or is this a reflection of other social realities, like fewer women choosing to be in the labour force, or working part-time? Our data analysis reveals that no matter how you cut it, women do seem to have a higher proclivity for volunteering. We explore why this might be.

25.3% of Americans choose to volunteer at least once a year, and nearly half of the individuals that volunteer do so an average of more than one hour per week. These numbers come from a September 2014 of Americans ages 15 and older conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics . Volunteering is defined as any unpaid work performed for an organization. It can include anything tutoring English at the local library, coaching your child's basketball team, or helping your church with a fundraiser.

Not all Americans are equally likely to volunteer. The probability that a given person will volunteer is impacted by their age, income, education level and, not least of all, by gender. In 2014, 28.4% of women volunteered at least once, while only 22.2% of men did so.

The following chart displays the percentage of Americans that volunteer at any given age. We can see from this chart that the likelihood of volunteering changes a great deal over our lives, but that women are always more inclined than men.

The likelihood of volunteering rises again in the late 30s and reaches its zenith in the early 40s. Over 30% of Americans between the ages of 40 and 45 volunteer. This is related to the increased likelihood of volunteering when having children. While having a baby actually makes you less likely to volunteer - only 17% of people whose first child is 2-years-old or less volunteer - when their child reaches school age, people become dramatically more likely to volunteer. Over 35% of parents with children between 6-13 volunteer, often for a school activity.

Though women volunteer more than men at all ages, the effect of having children does seem to be greater for women. We can see in the chart above that the gender difference is largest between 35 and 45, when 10% more women volunteer than men.

Parents frequently volunteer for their kids' school.

Yet even when we only compare men and women who work full-time, we still find a large gender gap in terms of who volunteers. 30.1% of women who work full-time also find the time to volunteer in comparison to just 23.8% of men.

Given the importance of income on the likelihood to volunteer, we wondered whether the gender gap might disappear at different levels of family earnings. These next three charts display the percentage of adult men and women working full-time who volunteer by family income and age.

We wondered if looking at what women and men actually do when they volunteer might give us some insight into the gender imbalance. The table below shows the proportion of men and women, of those who volunteer, who volunteer for different types of groups. Only the primary volunteer organization of the individual is included, so each individual is only counted once. For example, the main volunteer organization for 35.1% of women is a religious one, while this is only true of 33.2% of men.

Overall, looking at the groups that women volunteer for does not give us much of a clue to the discrepancy, but it does point to the gendered nature of certain types of volunteering.

So what accounts for the volunteer gap between the sexes?

Jesse Eubanks of the non-profit Love Thy Neighborhood blames the "suspended adolescence" of young American men today. He sees a large number of young men unwilling to embrace responsibility. "Man-boys" who are not ready to take on the risks and relationships of being in a community. The guys in probably were not doing much volunteer work.

Energize Inc. , a consultancy for nonprofits, published an entire dedicated to helping volunteer organizations recruit men. They suggest that one problem is that much of the recruiting material from organizations is oriented towards women. Men may feel like the organization is a female space when they only see female faces in brochures and other materials. Another challenge is that many organizations already have a preponderance of women, and any new men will feel that they don't belong. Being the first guy can be be uncomfortable.

When asked it was important to have men volunteer, Bryant responded that it was the same reason she wanted people of different races and economic backgrounds participating in her organization. "We want our group of volunteers as diverse as possible," Bryant explained. "Men can bring a different perspective."

By any way you slice it, when it comes to demonstrating altruism through volunteering, women are simply dominating men. Regardless of whether they work or not, how old they are, or how rich they are, women just volunteer more.

For our next post, we tell the story of Esurance's old mascot, who was discontinued after being made into cartoon porn. To get notified when we post it →

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Why Don't Men Volunteer as Much as Women? - Priceonomics

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We analyze the female dominance of volunteerism in America.

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“Chipotle Faces Another Foodborne Illness Outbreak, This Time In Boston” by Dan Charles

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“Chipotle Faces Another Foodborne Illness Outbreak, This Time In Boston” by Dan Charles

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Audio available with article

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Is it those holiday parties filled with people eating together? We're not sure, but we keep hearing about new clusters of people getting poisoned by their meals.

The latest outbreak sickened at least 120 people in Boston, most of them students at Boston College.

This included eight members of the college's basketball team. The team is scheduled to play Providence this evening, and as of this morning, it's unclear whether the game will happen.

Most of the sick students reported eating at a nearby Chipotle Mexican Grill. (The college updated the number of students sickened from 80 to 120 students at 12:26 p.m. on Wednesday.)

This provoked suspicions of a link to an earlier outbreak of E. coli poisoning in the Pacific Northwest traced to Chipotle restaurants there.

It appears, however, that the two outbreaks are unrelated. According to preliminary tests, the Boston College students were sickened by another disease-causing organism, called norovirus.

Norovirus is sometimes overlooked, because it is less likely to kill you than disease-causing forms of E. Coli or salmonella. But it is by far the most common source of foodborne illness, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Chipotle has closed the restaurant near Boston College while the investigation continues. Government inspectors cited the company for allowing an employee to work there while ill last week, although the illness was not specified. Norovirus is highly contagious and is generally spread from person to person. (For more on what it's like when this nasty bug strikes, read Emily Sohn's essay over at Shots.)

On the other side of the country, meanwhile, prominent food safety lawyer Bill Marler tells us by email that an outbreak of foodborne illness has dampened spirits in his own office building. Last week, 200 people complained that they didn't feel well after a catered event in that building. Three went to the hospital. They were infected with norovirus.

Today, all the restaurants in that building are closed, including a Starbucks. "People look a bit uncomfortable on crowded elevators," Marler writes.

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Chipotle Faces Another Foodborne Illness Outbreak, This Time In Boston

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Outbreaks of foodborne illness are ruining the holiday spirit for Chipotle. The latest cases erupted over the past few days among students at Boston College.

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Teen Launches Volunteer Website by Kevin Agostinelli

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Teen Launches Volunteer Website by Kevin Agostinelli

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“What’s the difference between bacteria and viruses?” by Ask Smithsonian

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“What’s the difference between bacteria and viruses?” by Ask Smithsonian

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Ask Smithsonian: Whats the Difference Between Bacteria and Viruses?

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“These Teens Made a Difference: Patrick Pedraja” by Mariam El Hasan

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“These Teens Made a Difference: Patrick Pedraja” by Mariam El Hasan

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Diseases and Illnesses

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Instantly access over 40,000 of the best books & videos for kids on Epic

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“Teens unite for the planet” by Green Living Editors

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“Teens unite for the planet” by Green Living Editors

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Newsela | Teen Activist Text Set - 2020.02.17

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Newsela is an Instructional Content Platform that supercharges reading engagement and learning in every subject.