Well, at Least We Didn’t Face the Bubonic Plague Pandemic
Yes, it’s 2020 and bad things are happening. But diagnoses of several cases of plague in Mongolia and Inner Mongolia do not bode well for a repeat of the Black Death. Like the so-called killer hornets , this panic is another setback.
As we mentioned earlier , several cases of plague are reported in the news every year. Plague is a disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis , and the disease it causes is known as bubonic plague if it affects your lymph nodes, and pneumonic plague if it affects your lungs.
While the 1300s plague pandemic is one of the best known, the disease hasn’t really gone anywhere. It infects rodents more often than humans, and the marmots of Mongolia and prairie dogs of the southwestern United States have known plague reservoirs, as they are called. Every year in the United States, between 1 and 17 people contract the plague. According to the World Health Organization, between 2010 and 2015, there were 3,248 cases of plague and 584 deaths from plague worldwide .
The plague is still dangerous and can be fatal, but it can be treated with antibiotics . (If you think you have the plague, seek medical attention.)
“The word ‘plague’ often conjures up ‘the Middle Ages’, which is why many people believe that the plague is gone,” Winston Black , a medical historian, emailed me. “Journalists depend on this … ignorance to tell story after story, in which minor localized outbreaks of the plague are presented as the possible return of the Black Death. This misleading image has become even more prevalent now during COVID, as the plague can be added to horror lists (such as hornets being killed in Canada) that are used to increase clicks (or “sell paper” if that’s when – or will happen) “.
There is no reason to believe that plague poses a greater threat this year than it did last year or the year before. Black says he’s more worried about COVID than the plague, but notes that if you’re ready to move beyond the newest pandemic, other diseases such as tuberculosis and malaria claim millions of lives worldwide every year.
However, there may be a reason why we are especially interested in the plague right now. “The stories told by European and Middle Eastern authors (Christians, Jews and Muslims) about the plague have been repeated and expanded over the centuries, and give us a language and a range of emotions and reactions that are considered“ acceptable ”or“ normal ”in the world. the face of the pandemic, ”Black says.
We are already experiencing one pandemic, which is a global phenomenon that (hopefully) happens only once in a lifetime. That alone is enough, isn’t it?