Chris Crawford wrote:
> 5 people have died of the Black Death in New Mexico this year already. I'm
> not joking! I didn't know anyone ever got that anymore, but I guess if it
> had to be anywhere it had to be in the USA's little corner of the third
> world, New Mexico.
Actually, according to the book "The Great Mortality: An Intimate
History of the Black Death" (*great* book, BTW!), the American Southwest
(New Mexico in particular) has long been known as a modern geocache for
the disease, with a high and unstable population of rodents. Another
one is the steppes of Russia, which is where the Black Death of the
1330s-1340s was probably contracted by European travelers to/from the
Orient. In general, the rule is "stay away from any rodent that appears
to be staggering."
Yersinia pestis is a relatively modern disease, probably only in
existence since the beginning of the latest interglacial period, about
20,000 years ago. It's pretty much everywhere -- in the late 1990s, one
of my clients was Alberta Health, which was putting together a
disease-tracking app. Yersinia pestis was listed as one of the public
health concerns of the province. According to what I've read, Y. pestis
appears to have been hurriedly cobbled together by evolutionary forces
as a natural response to rodent overpopulations worldwide. It crossed
the species barrier accidentally via the rodents' fleas "jumping ship,"
as it were.
It can virtually always be stopped dead in its tracks by modern
antibiotics, but only if recognized and treated in time. We'll probably
never totally eliminate the plague, but it's no longer the big deal it
was 700-odd years ago. Even the manifestation on the Indian
subcontinent in the late 1800s was nothing compared to the outbreak in
the mid-1300s. Epidemiologists and others still have no firm idea why
that particular outbreak was so incredibly nasty, although they have
lots of persuasive theories.
During the 1340s plague, in some parts of Britain (particularly portions
of the Cornwall coast and, oddly, parts of the county of Oxford), the
mortality rate was 100%. Entire villages simply disappeared forever.
Writings which survived depict a population convinced that the Day of
Judgment had arrived.
Garth
(and yes, I'm a bit of a geek when it comes to the subject of "The
Plague" -- I read everything I can get my hands on about it...)
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