Patients develop fever, chills, extreme weakness, abdominal pain, shock, and possibly bleeding into the skin and other organs. Skin and other tissues may turn black and die, especially on fingers, toes, and the nose.
Bubonic plague causes fever, fatigue, shivering, vomiting, headaches, giddiness, intolerance to light, pain in the back and limbs, sleeplessness, apathy, and delirium. It also causes buboes: one or more of the lymph nodes become tender and swollen, usually in the groin or armpits.
Bubonic plague is an infection spread mostly to humans by infected fleas that travel on rodents. Called the Black Death, it killed millions of Europeans during the Middle Ages. Prevention doesn't include a vaccine, but does involve reducing your exposure to mice, rats, squirrels and other animals that may be infected.
Fleas become infected by feeding on rodents, such as chipmunks, prairie dogs, ground squirrels, mice, and other mammals that are infected with the bacterium Yersinia pestis. Fleas transmit the plague bacteria to humans and other mammals during a subsequent feeding.
Known as the Black Death during medieval times, today plague occurs in fewer than 5,000 people a year worldwide. It can be deadly if not treated promptly with antibiotics. The most common form of plague results in swollen and tender lymph nodes — called buboes — in the groin, armpits or neck.
Within 72 hours, the disease's symptoms appeared. As a result, the sealing of borders meant that those infected would not spread the disease further within the country's borders. They isolated those who were already infected and quarantined them.
Humans get the plague through direct contact with infected animals or fleas. In the U.S., people can contract the plague when disposing of squirrels or mice that died from the infection or traveled to an area where infected animals live. Human-to-human transmission is extremely rare.
A new study suggests that people who survived the medieval mass-killing plague known as the Black Death lived significantly longer and were healthier than people who lived before the epidemic struck in 1347.
In the study, Barreiro and his colleagues found that Black Death survivors in London and Denmark had an edge in their genes – mutations that helped protect against the plague pathogen, Yersinia pestis. Survivors passed those mutations onto their descendants, and many Europeans still carry those mutations today.
They believed this would remove the bad smells from the air before the doctor breathed it, preventing the doctors from catching the plague.
It is especially contagious and can trigger severe epidemics through person-to-person contact via droplets in the air. Historically, plague was responsible for widespread pandemics with high mortality. It was known as the "Black Death" during the fourteenth century, causing more than 50 million deaths in Europe.
Patients develop fever, chills, extreme weakness, abdominal pain, shock, and possibly bleeding into the skin and other organs.
Antiserum. The first application of antiserum to the treatment of patients is credited to Yersin [5], who used serum developed with the assistance of his Parisian colleagues Calmette, Roux, and Borrel.
The impact was as dreadful as feared: In 1349, the Black Death killed about half of all Londoners; from 1347 to 1351, it killed between 30% and 60% of all Europeans. For those who lived through that awful time, it seemed no one was safe.
New cases of the bubonic plague found in China are making headlines. But health experts say there's no chance a plague epidemic will strike again, as the plague is easily prevented and cured with antibiotics.
Despite the limitations of the available data, Russell concluded that age did have an effect on Black Death mortality; he argued that older men were particularly susceptible (although individuals over the age of 60 apparently fared better than those in their late 50s), and children between the ages of ten and fifteen ...
Historians estimate that it reduced the total world population from 475 million to between 350 and 375 million. In most parts of Europe, it took nearly 80 years for population sizes to recover, and in some areas more than 150 years.
Remove brush, rock piles, junk, cluttered firewood, and possible rodent food supplies, such as pet and wild animal food. Make your home and outbuildings rodent-proof. Wear gloves if you are handling or skinning potentially infected animals to prevent contact between your skin and the plague bacteria.
Antibiotics such as streptomycin, gentamicin, doxycycline, or ciprofloxacin are used to treat plague. Oxygen, intravenous fluids, and respiratory support are usually also needed.
Plague in the United States
The last urban plague epidemic in the United States occurred in Los Angeles from 1924 through 1925. Plague then spread from urban rats to rural rodent species, and became entrenched in many areas of the western United States.
Democratic Republic of Congo, Madagascar and Peru are the three most endemic countries. People infected with plague usually develop influenza-like symptoms after an incubation period of 3–7 days. Symptoms include fever, chills, aches, weakness, vomiting and nausea. There are 3 main forms of plague.
The plague vaccine licensed for use in the United States is prepared from Y. pestis organisms grown in artificial media, inactivated with formaldehyde, and preserved in 0.5% phenol. The vaccine contains trace amounts of beef-heart extract, yeast extract, agar, and peptones and peptides of soya and casein.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), through April 17 this year, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has reported 56 cases of bubonic plague, including two deaths.
When it came to treating the plague, doctors would try to remove 'the toxic imbalance' from the body by bloodletting their patients. They also lanced, rubbed toads on, or applied leeches to the buboes - the swollen lymph nodes - to try to remove the illness.
As such, the plague is a zoonosis, an illness that passes from animals to humans. Infection spread easily because the rats were drawn to human activity, especially the food supplies kept in barns, mills, and homes.