October 14, 2014
Is Ebola the Same Virus as the Black Death?

By Chriss Street

Most people assume that the fourteenth-century Black Death that quickly ravaged the western world was a bacterial bubonic plague epidemic caused by flea bites and spread by rats. But the Black Death killed a high proportion of Scandinavians where it was too cold for fleas to survive. Biology of Plagues. Evidence from Historical Populations published by Cambridge University Press, analyzed 2,500 years of plagues and concluded that the Black Death was caused by a viral hemorrhagic fever pandemic similar to Ebola. If this is correct, the future medical and economic impacts from Ebola have been vastly underestimated.

Authors Dr. Susan Scott, a demographer, and Dr. Christopher J. Duncan, a zoologist at the University of Liverpool point out that the Bible used the term “plague” to describe a catchall of afflictions resulting from divine displeasure. The researchers analyzed the “Four Ages of Plague”, including the “Plague of Athens” from 430 to 427 BC that killed about a third of the city; the “Plague of Justinian” from 542 to 592 AD and killed 10,000 a day in Constantinople; the Black Plague from 1337 to 1340 AD that killed a third of Eurasia; and a series of plague outbreaks in Europe from 1350 to 1670 that killed about half a number of city populations.

Historical records of the Athenian plague paint a very similar picture to the Black Death and the accelerating Ebola pandemic. Like Ebola, the plague is believed to have originated in Africa and then travelled northward.

Athenians suffered a sudden onset of severe headache, inflamed eyes, and bleeding in their mouths and throats. The next symptoms were coughing, sneezing, and chest pains; followed by stomach cramps, intensive vomiting and diarrhea, and unquenchable thirst. With flushed skin burning from fever and open sores, 50-90% died in the second week of symptoms. Desperate to cool off, contagious victims may have transmitted the disease to other humans by jumping into public cisterns and watering troughs.

Bubonic plague was first recorded in China about 37 AD and still is a worldwide public health problem with thousands of cases each year. The most recent outbreak was in the Chinese city of Yumen on July 22, 2014, where a man died after handling a dead marmot. The Chinese military responded by quarantining 30,000 local residents.

The first symptom of bubonic plague is a mild and non-alarming fever. But bubonic swellings follow within a few days. Sufferers either go into a deep coma or become violently delirious, paranoid, and suicidal. Most victims die within a few days. Recovery is almost certain for those whose “buboes”, sores lymph glands, fill with pus. But before antibiotics, the appearance of black blisters was considered a sign of imminent death.

Bubonic plague is very seldom spread from person to person. The disease needs a rodent population, usually rats, to carry fleas to spread the infection to humans. Once the local rats die out from the infection, human infections tend to tail off.

For the 2011 book, The Black Death in London, archaeologist Barney Sloane, who worked on medieval sites for the Museum of London and is now attached to English Heritage, documents the 1348-49 epidemic that killed two thirds of the city could not have been bubonic plague, because “The evidence just isn't there to support it.”

Read more: American Thinker

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Bubonic plague is very seldom spread from person to person. The disease needs a rodent population, usually rats, to carry fleas to spread the infection to humans. Once the local rats die out from the infection, human infections tend to tail off.

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OTH there could have been a combination of bubonic and pneumonic plague combined with poor nutrition and close libing quarters.

"Human Y. pestis infection takes three main forms: pneumonic, septicemic, and bubonic plagues.[1] "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yersinia_pestis

"Pneumonic plague, a severe type of lung infection, is one of three main forms of plague, all of which are caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. It is more virulent and rare than bubonic plague. The difference between the versions of plague is simply the location of the infection in the body;"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumonic_plague


Black death skeletons reveal pitiful life of 14th-century Londoners
DNA from emaciated London Black Death skeletons matches modern plague bacteria and supports airborne theory of spread
Vanessa Thorpe
Saturday 29 March 2014 18.01 EDT

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.............Evidence taken from the human remains found in Charterhouse Square, to the north of the City of London, during excavations carried out as part of the construction of the Crossrail train line, may support a theory held by some scientists that only an airborne infection could have spread so fast and killed so quickly.
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By extracting the DNA of the disease bacterium, Yersinia pestis, from the largest teeth in some of the skulls retrieved from the square, the scientists were able to compare the strain of bubonic plague preserved there with that which was recently responsible for killing 60 people in Madagascar. To their surprise, the 14th-century strain, the cause of the most lethal catastrophe in recorded history, was no more virulent than today's disease. The DNA codes were an almost perfect match.

According to scientists working at Public Health England in Porton Down, for any plague to spread at such a pace it must have got into the lungs of victims who were malnourished and then been spread by coughs and sneezes. It was therefore a pneumonic plague rather than a bubonic plague
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The skeletons at Charterhouse Square reveal that the population of London was also in generally poor health when the disease struck. Crossrail's archaeology contractor, Don Walker, and Jelena Bekvalacs of the Museum of London found evidence of rickets, anaemia, bad teeth and childhood malnutrition...............

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http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/...s-london-plague

More about DNA evidence:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death#DNA_evidence

Quote: PzLdr wrote in post #4

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Ebola is a virus. Bubonic Plague is caused by germs, I believe. they're not the same.

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Quote: Frank Cannon wrote in post #3

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Is Ebola the Same Virus as the Black Death?

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If you ask Reverman Jessie Jackson, it is....damn racists.

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Winston Smith need to get to work changing Black Death to White Death.