COVID-19 WAR!!!MEMORIES OF THE BLACK PLAGUE RECALLED BY ABDULMUMINI ADEKU,LAGOS,NIGERIA

Covid 19 war !!!Memories of the Black Plague recalled

By abdulmumini adeku.

Many have recalled the Black Plague of the 1940s as the rest of the world continue to battle the realities of the Covid-19 pandemic .

A source while speaking to the News office Desk  of the E.N.M.Paedia Express Multimedia Group of Lagos,Nigeria said that the black plague  had a devastating effect on the entire globe especially in Europe and Asia at the time it struck with one in every three having it at the time.

He recalled that even though he was not born at the time but literary accounts showed that people had to be burnt via incineration through mass cremation so that the disease could be contained..

This reporter first heard of the Black Plague in a Christain ministration when a Pastor of the Jesus Embassy Parish ,Redeem Christain Church of God ,ifako-Ijaiye ,Lagos ,Nigeria made mention of it in the last two weeks during a church service…

HISTORY OF THE BLACK PLAGUE/BLACK DEATH

The Black Death, also known as the Pestilence, Great Bubonic Plague, the Great Plague or the Plague, or less commonly the Great Mortality or the Black Plague, was the most devastating pandemic recorded in human history, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 75 to 200 million people in Eurasia, peaking in Europe from 1347 to 1351.^[1][2][3] The bacterium Yersinia pestis, which results in several forms of plague (septicemic, pneumonic and, the most common, bubonic), is believed to have been the cause.^[4] The Black Death was the first major European outbreak of plague and the second plague pandemic.^[5] The plague created a number of religious, social and economic upheavals, with profound effects on the course of European history.
The Black Death probably originated in Central Asia or East Asia,^{[6][7][8][9][10]} from where it travelled along the Silk Road, reaching Crimea by 1343.^[11] From there, it was most likely carried by fleas living on the black rats that traveled on Genoese merchant ships, spreading throughout the Mediterranean Basin, reaching the rest of Europe via the Italian peninsula.
The Black Death is estimated to have killed 30% to 60% of Europe's population.^[12] In total, the plague may have reduced the world population from an estimated 475 million to 350–375 million in the 14th century.^[13] It took 200 years for Europe's population to recover to its previous level,^[14] and some regions (such as Florence) only recovered by the 19th century.^[15][16][17] The plague recurred as outbreaks until the early 20th century.

 Contemporary accounts of the plague are often varied or imprecise. The most commonly noted symptom was the appearance of buboes (or gavocciolos) in the groin, the neck and armpits, which oozed pus and bled when opened.^[59] Boccaccio's description:

In men and women alike it first betrayed itself by the emergence of certain tumours in the groin or armpits, some of which grew as large as a common apple, others as an egg ... From the two said parts of the body this deadly gavocciolo soon began to propagate and spread itself in all directions indifferently; after which the form of the malady began to change, black spots or livid making their appearance in many cases on the arm or the thigh or elsewhere, now few and large, now minute and numerous. As the gavocciolo had been and still was an infallible token of approaching death, such also were these spots on whomsoever they showed themselves.^[60]

The only medical detail that is questionable in Boccaccio's description is that the gavocciolo was an "infallible token of approaching death", as, if the bubo discharges, recovery is possible.^[61]

This was followed by acute fever and vomiting of blood. Most victims died two to seven days after initial infection. Freckle-like spots and rashes,^[62] which could have been caused by flea-bites, were identified as another potential sign of the plague.

Some accounts, like that of Lodewijk Heyligen, whose master the Cardinal Colonna died of the plague in 1348, noted a distinct form of the disease that infected the lungs and led to respiratory problems^[59] and is identified with pneumonic plague.

It is said that the plague takes three forms. In the first people suffer an infection of the lungs, which leads to breathing difficulties. Whoever has this corruption or contamination to any extent cannot escape but will die within two days. Another form ... in which boils erupt under the armpits, ... a third form in which people of both sexes are attacked in the groin.^[63]

Causes

The Oriental rat flea (Xenopsylla cheopis) engorged with blood. This species of flea is the primary vector for the transmission of Yersinia pestis, the organism responsible for spreading bubonic plague in most plague epidemics. Both male and female fleas feed on blood and can transmit the infection.

Oriental rat flea (Xenopsylla cheopis) infected with the Yersinia pestis bacterium which appears as a dark mass in the gut. The foregut (proventriculus) of this flea is blocked by a Y. pestis biofilm; when the flea feeds on an uninfected host Y. pestis is regurgitated into the wound, causing infection.

Yersinia pestis (200× magnification), the bacterium which causes bubonic plague^[64]

Medical knowledge had stagnated during the Middle Ages. The most authoritative account at the time came from the medical faculty in Paris in a report to the king of France that blamed the heavens, in the form of a conjunction of three planets in 1345 that caused a "great pestilence in the air".^[65] This report became the first and most widely circulated of a series of plague tracts that sought to give advice to sufferers. That the plague was caused by bad air became the most widely accepted theory at the time, the miasma theory. The word plague did not at first refer to a specific illness, and only the recurrence of outbreaks during the Middle Ages gave it the meaning which persists in modern medicine.

The importance of hygiene was recognised only in the nineteenth century; until then streets were commonly filthy, with live animals of all sorts around and human parasites abounding, facilitating the spread of transmissible disease. One early medical advance as a result of the Black Death was the establishment of the idea of quarantine in the city-state of Ragusa (modern Dubrovnik, Croatia) in 1377 after continuing outbreaks.^[66]

Today, the dominant explanation for the Black Death is the plague theory, which attributes the outbreak to Yersinia pestis, also responsible for an epidemic that began in southern China in 1865, eventually spreading to India. The investigation of the pathogen that caused the 19th-century plague was begun by teams of scientists who visited Hong Kong in 1894, among whom was the French-Swiss bacteriologist Alexandre Yersin, after whom the pathogen was named.^[67] The mechanism by which Y. pestis is usually transmitted was established in 1898 by Paul-Louis Simond and was found to involve the bites of fleas whose midguts had become obstructed by replicating Y. pestis several days after feeding on an infected host. This blockage starves the fleas and drives them to aggressive feeding behaviour and attempts to clear the blockage by regurgitation, resulting in thousands of plague bacteria being flushed into the feeding site, infecting the host. The bubonic plague mechanism was also dependent on two populations of rodents: one resistant to the disease, which act as hosts, keeping the disease endemic, and a second that lack resistance. When the second population dies, the fleas move on to other hosts, including people, thus creating a human epidemic.^[67]

The historian Francis Aidan Gasquet wrote about the Great Pestilence in 1893^[68] and suggested that "it would appear to be some form of the ordinary Eastern or bubonic plague". He was able to adopt the epidemiology of the bubonic plague for the Black Death for the second edition in 1908, implicating rats and fleas in the process, and his interpretation was widely accepted for other ancient and medieval epidemics, such as the Plague of Justinian that was prevalent in the Eastern Roman Empire from 541 to 700 CE.^[67]

An estimate of the case fatality rate for the modern bubonic plague, following the introduction of antibiotics, is 11%, although it may be higher in underdeveloped regions.^[69] Symptoms of the disease include fever of 38–41 °C (100–106 °F), headaches, painful aching joints, nausea and vomiting, and a general feeling of malaise. Left untreated, of those that contract the bubonic plague, 80 percent die within eight days.^[70] Pneumonic plague has a mortality rate of 90 to 95 percent. Symptoms include fever, cough, and blood-tinged sputum. As the disease progresses, sputum becomes free-flowing and bright red. Septicemic plague is the least common of the three forms, with a mortality rate near 100%. Symptoms are high fevers and purple skin patches (purpura due to disseminated intravascular coagulation). In cases of pneumonic and particularly septicemic plague, the progress of the disease is so rapid that there would often be no time for the development of the enlarged lymph nodes that were noted as buboes.^[71]

A number of alternative theories, implicating other diseases in the Black Death pandemic, have also been proposed by some modern scientists

PICTURE CREDITS:GOOGLE