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“The Black Death” Even before the “death ships” pulled into port at Messina, many Europeans had heard rumors about a “Great Pestilence” that was carving a deadly path across the trade routes of the Near and Far East. (Early in the 1340s, the disease had struck China, India, Persia, Syria and Egypt.) However, they were scarcely equipped for the horrible reality of the Black Death. “In men and women alike,” the Italian poet Giovanni Boccaccio wrote, “at the beginning of the malady, certain swellings, either on the groin or under the armpits…waxed to the bigness of a common apple, others to the size of an egg, some more and some less, and these the vulgar named plague-boils.” Blood and pus seeped out of these strange swellings, which were followed by a host of other unpleasant symptoms–fever, chills, vomiting, diarrhea, terrible aches and pains–and then, in short order, death. The Black Death was terrifyingly, indiscriminately contagious: “the mere touching of the clothes,” wrote Boccaccio, “appeared to itself to communicate the malady to the toucher.” The disease was also terrifyingly efficient. People who were perfectly healthy when they went to bed at night could be dead by morning

he Black Death

We know today that yellow fever is a virus spread by the Aedes aegypti mosquito. This mosquito has peculiar habits which we are continuing to learn about. Its most distinguishing feature from other mosquitoes is its preference for urban habitat. It breeds best in relatively clean standing water and cisterns were a prominent feature among many city houses in that day before indoor plumbing. It also feeds during the day, and so must have quite enjoyed the bustling scenes common at the quays of the major port cities of the 18th century. Finally, it has no trouble adapting to life inside a house. Thus in a day when window screens were unknown, it had ready access to relatively protected environments.

In the fall of 1918 the Great War in Europe was winding down and peace was on the horizon.

The Americans had joined in the fight, bringing the Allies closer to victory against the Germans. Deep within the trenches these men lived through some of the most brutal conditions of life, which it seemed could not be any worse. Then, in pockets across the globe, something erupted that seemed as benign as the common cold. The influenza of that season, however, was far more than a cold. In the two years that this scourge ravaged the earth, a fifth of the world's population was infected. The flu was most deadly for people ages 20 to 40. This pattern of morbidity was unusual for influenza which is usually a killer of the elderly and young children. It infected 28% of all Americans (Tice). An estimated 675,000 Americans died of influenza during the pandemic, ten times as many as in the world war. Of the U.S. soldiers who died in Europe, half of them fell to the influenza virus and not to the enemy (Deseret News). An estimated 43,000 servicemen mobilized for WWI died of influenza (Crosby). 1918 would go down as unforgettable year of suffering and death and yet of peace. As noted in the Journal of the American Medical Association final edition of 1918:

The influenza pandemic circled the globe. Most of humanity felt the effects of this strain of the influenza virus. It spread following the path of its human car

Mary Mallon, now known as Typhoid Mary, seemed a healthy woman when a health inspector knocked on her door in 1907, yet she was the cause of several typhoid outbreaks. Since Mary was the first "healthy carrier" of typhoid fever in the United States, she did not understand how someone not sick could spread disease -- so she tried to fight back.

The influenza or flu pandemic of 1918 to 1919, the deadliest in modern history, infected an estimated 500 million people worldwide–about one-third of the planet’s population at the time–and killed an estimated 20 million to 50 million victims. More than 25 percent of the U.S. population became sick, and some 675,000 Americans died during the pandemic.

One incident, however, claims attention. In the year 1854 a terrible recrudescence of cholera, due, as was supposed, to the contamination of the water furnished by the notorious Broad Street pump, in the parish of St James's, Westminster, ravaged the Metropolis and particularly the immediate neighbourhood of the Hospital (Golden Square). Twenty-two years before, cholera had sprung suddenly upon a profession utterly unprepared to deal with it and destitute of a principle to guide them in organising the best defence against the new foe. In 1849 it was found that their experience had not taught them much. In 1854 they had still to search among their record of cases for any agreement as to the best way out of their perplexities.

The death toll from a yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia hits 100 on this day in 1793. By the time it ended, 5,000 people were dead. Yellow fever, or American plague as it was known at the time, is a viral disease that begins with fever and muscle pain. Next, victims often become jaundiced (hence, the term "yellow" fever), as their liver and kidneys cease to function normally. Some of the afflicted then suffer even worse symptoms. Famous early American Cotton Mather described it as "turning yellow then vomiting and bleeding every way." Internal bleeding in the digestive tract causes bloody vomit. Many victims become delirious before dying. The virus, like malaria, is carried and transferred by mosquitoes. The first yellow fever outbreaks in the United States occurred in late 1690s. Nearly 100 years later, in the late summer of 1793, refugees from a yellow fever epidemic in the Caribbean fled to Philadelphia. Within weeks, people throughout the city were experiencing symptoms. By the middle of October, 100 people were dying from the virus every day. Caring for the victims so strained public services that the local city government collapsed. Philadelphia was also the seat of the United States government at the time, but federal authorities simply evacuated the city in face of the raging epidemic. Eventually, a cold front eliminated Philadelphia's mosquito population and the death toll fell to 20 per day by October 26. Today, a vaccine prevents yellow fever in much of the world, though 20,000 people still die every year from the disease.

Western Africa has long been regarded as the home of yellow fever, although the first recorded outbreaks of the disease were in central and coastal South America after the Spanish conquest in the 16th century. For the next 300 years, yellow fever, given various names such as Yellow Jack and “the saffron scourge,” was one of the great plagues of the New World. The tropical and subtropical regions of the Americas were subjected to devastating epidemics, and serious outbreaks occurred as far north as Philadelphia, New York, and Boston but also as far away from the endemic centres as Spain, France, England, and Italy.

The citizens of Gloucester thought that the disease must be somehow contagious and expected that by closing their gates to refugees from Bristol, they would be able to prevent its incursion. Yet, the Black Death was rarely spread from person to person by normal viral means, and when it was, it was in such a virulent form that the carrier was usually dead before they could pass the disease on to anyone outside their immediate household. The plague was caused by a complex series of bacterial strains called Yersinia pestis (Y. pestis), found in the digestive tract of fleas. It usually lives in the fleas of animals, Xenopsylla cheopsis or Cortophylus fasciatus, but in exceptional circumstances, it can live in the human flea Pulex irritans, and can even 'hibernate' for up to 6 months in favourable conditions like dung-piles or cargo bales.