Over the weekend, news emerged that a variant of the same bacteria that caused the infamous" Black Death" or bubonic plague, in medieval Europe had claimed three lives in the Chinese province of Qinghai, prompting the government to quarantine the town of Ziketan, home to 10,000 people.
The bacteria responsible, Yersinia pestis, is the same bacteria that caused the bubonic plague, which wiped out, millions of people in Europe in the fourteenth century.
While this form of the disease, known as pneumonic plague, spreads from human to human, without needing rats or fleas for transmission, it is not the grave threat to humans it was in medieval times.
"In this form, the organism gets in the lung -- that allows it to be transmitted by coughing," explained Philip Alcabes, associate professor in the program in urban public health at Hunter College's School of Health Sciences and author of Dread: How Fear And Fantasy Have Fueled Epidemics From The Black Death To Avian Flu. "The problem with that is that it allows it to be transmitted directly from person to person."
Blast From the Past: Plague Strikes China - ABC News
The bacteria responsible, Yersinia pestis, is the same bacteria that caused the bubonic plague, which wiped out, millions of people in Europe in the fourteenth century.
While this form of the disease, known as pneumonic plague, spreads from human to human, without needing rats or fleas for transmission, it is not the grave threat to humans it was in medieval times.
"In this form, the organism gets in the lung -- that allows it to be transmitted by coughing," explained Philip Alcabes, associate professor in the program in urban public health at Hunter College's School of Health Sciences and author of Dread: How Fear And Fantasy Have Fueled Epidemics From The Black Death To Avian Flu. "The problem with that is that it allows it to be transmitted directly from person to person."
Blast From the Past: Plague Strikes China - ABC News
