What Caused The Black Death?

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By C J Duncan, S Scott – Principia Scientific International

For the whole of the 20th century it was believed that the Black Death and all the plagues of Europe (1347–1670) were epidemics of bubonic plague.

This review presents evidence that this view is incorrect and that the disease was a viral haemorrhagic fever, characterised by a long incubation period of 32 days, which allowed it to be spread widely even with the limited transport of the Middle Ages.

It is suggested that haemorrhagic plague emerged from its animal host in Ethiopia and struck repeatedly at European/Asian civilisations, before appearing as the Black Death.

Immediately on its arrival in 1347 in the port of Messina in Sicily the Great Pestilence (or Black Death as it was named in 1823 because of the black blotches caused by subcutaneous haemorrhages that appeared on the skin of victims) was recognised as a directly infectious disease.

Michael of Piazza, a Franciscan friar who wrote 10 years after the Black Death had arrived, said “The infection spread to everyone who had any intercourse with the disease”.1 Indeed, they believed (incorrectly) that priests who heard the confessions of the dying “were immediately overcome by death, so that some even remained in the rooms of the dying.”1

Case mortality was 100%. They realised that safety lay in fleeing but this, very effectively, served only to spread the infection.

The Black Death moved as a wave northwards through Europe at an average speed of about 4 km per day and reached the Arctic Circle by 1350, remarkable progress in the days of very limited means of transport.2–4

Even more impressively: it had earlier appeared in Asia Minor and the Crimea and moved south through Antioch; it was present in the Levant and spread along the north African coastlands and to Mecca in Saudi Arabia, covering, in all, some seven million square km.

When it had burnt itself out, 40% of the population of Europe had been killed. This outbreak was a pandemic on a scale never before experienced (or since).

But this unknown disease had not disappeared completely and there were epidemics scattered through Europe during the 1350s.5 Thereafter, the plague was permanently established in France with epidemics every year that cycled round the main trading routes.

From there, infected travellers carried the disease by road and river across the continental landmass and by sea to Britain and Ireland. But all these peripheral epidemics died out completely and were restarted by fresh infectives coming from the focus in France.4

The epidemics progressively increased in spread, frequency, and ferocity (fig 1) with a pronounced rise after 1550 because transport improved and the population of the towns steadily grew (that is, there was a greater number of susceptibles). Contemporary accounts, pattern of spread, and mortality all confirm that the same pathogen was responsible for all the plagues, including the first strike of the Black Death.

Figure 1

 Number of places in Europe reporting a plague epidemic, 1350–1670. Note the increased frequency after 1550. Data from Biraben.5

PUBLIC HEALTH MEASURES

Even in the 14th century the health authorities in northern Italy had established the importance of a 40 day quarantine period, which became the gold standard for continental Europe for the next 300 years. The 40 day quarantine was not adopted in England until the 16th century and even then it was changed to 30 days only to find that this was completely ineffective, whereupon this regulation was speedily rescinded.

The complete success of the quarantine period confirms that the plague was a directly infectious disease and it also shows that it had a long incubation period. Towns in France gradually realised that the danger lay in the arrival of an infected traveller who may well have come from a considerable distance.

Entry was denied if they had come from a town that had suffered an epidemic. Later, in addition to inspecting travellers on arrival, the authorities also required proof that all the towns through which they had journeyed were completely free of plague.

Once an epidemic had erupted, those displaying symptoms were removed to emergency primitive isolation hospitals called pest (an abbreviation of pestilence) houses, which were hurriedly erected outside the town. Once a plague case had been identified, the family was locked up in the house, the well known cross was daubed on the door, and a watchman was appointed to stand guard.

These measures were less successful in containing an epidemic because, as shown below, victims were more infectious before the appearance of the symptoms.

Despite only sketchy medical knowledge at the time, the epidemiology of the plague was fully understood at least by the middle of the 17th century. Daniel Defoe6 had perspicaciously noted that, in the Great Plague of London in 1665, “because of its infectious nature, the disease may be spread by apparently healthy people who harbour the disease but have not yet exhibited the symptoms.

Such a person was in fact a poisoner, a walking destroyer perhaps for a week or a fortnight before his death, who might have ruined those that he would have hazarded his life to save… breathing death upon them, even perhaps his tender kissing and embracings of his own children.”

Clearly, they recognised that victims were infectious before the symptoms appeared, the lengthy duration of the incubation period, the necessity of a 40 day quarantine, and the dangers of droplet infection. But there were many features of the epidemics that were mystifying and they also clung to their beliefs in divine intervention, transmission via contaminated clothing and bedding, movements of the planets, and poisonous miasmas.

Read the full article here.

Via https://principia-scientific.org/what-caused-the-black-death/

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