Table of Contents

Introduction……………………………………………………………………………5

How the Plague started…………………………………………………………..9

The Journey to England…………………………………………………………12

The Aftermath………………………………………………………………………15

Introduction

A plague is a deadly disease that is caused by bacteria. Once you have the disease, it’s kind of unstoppable; it spreads like wildfire! It is usually rats that carry them and fleas are then infected. If an infected flea bites a human the results are instantaneous: the human will cough and sneeze so hard that drops of blood will come out while coughing (another thing that plays a role here is the bacteria’s capabilities: it can rip open minor blood vessels).

A reason is that this is no ordinary bacteria, it’s called Yersinia pestis (next page). Within the first week of infection, there

will be bulges under your shirt (especially in humid areas of the body); these bulges turn out to be rose-like structures of swelling (which, coincidentally, was red too). The suffering person will vomit quite frequently as soon as the bulging starts. All these symptoms will soon lead to death

Believe it or not, you have definitely heard of the symptoms of Plague in your first 3-4 years. Yes, it is the Nursery Rhyme Ring-a Ring-a Roses. This is how it explains the symptoms of the Plague:

Ring-a Ring-a Roses

Pocket full of posies

Atishoo, Atishoo

We all fall down

In the first line, the poem describes the bulges while the second indicates the technique (in the 17th century) attempted to stop the Plague: herbs and flowers. On the other hand, the third line

is the sneezing whereas the fourth shows that soon after the sneezing, everyone dies.

How the Plague Started

It may sound like this is crazy, but the following is true: the plague actually started in the east (next page), but was passed on to the west! The eastern side of China were the first to face this threat; however, their trade routes passed on the killer infection to almost everywhere in Asia! Now, everyone knows how well the west trades with the east, thus passing the chain in the hands of Italy. From here, the bacteria spread upwards as the temperature kept rising.

As you can see, the source of the plague wasn’t Europe, it was

Asia. Asia had the perfect climate for the rats to live: warm and damp. Then through the process shown earlier, the humans get infected. This infection spreads as many people in their daily lives contact each other (physical). Further more, the rats may enter a ship going abroad to trade which spreads the infection even more and to new places!

Unfortunately, no one knew anything about this plague at the time it spread; this ignorance led to the death of millions in number, from both: west and east. Do you think that anyone could have done something to stop the spreading?

The Journey to England

As soon as the spreading began, England was already in imminent danger of being the next country to be invaded by Yersinia pestis just because, as you may know it, their trade routes. Fortunately (for England), the disease didn’t reach England until the Dutch got it.

Immediately after the Italians started to drop dead the French were dying too! This is how fast trade routes can transfer diseases. The Dutch had great trades with the French, so as you may have suspected, the Dutch caught the invisible

attackers.

As stated earlier, the English didn’t get this killer disease until the Dutch did. King Charles II attempted to cease connection between the British and the Dutch when he saw that his subjects were dying and there was reported plague in Europe. Unfortunately, this attempt failed since the virus had already entered the country. The king thought it were the stray cats and dogs causing the infection, so he destroyed roughly 80,000 dogs and the same number of cats. What the poor king didn’t know was that killing cats and dogs RAISED the number of deaths since there were less creatures to kill the rats!

The Aftermath

Before you ask how many people died, the only aftermath given will be for England, not worldwide.

Approximately 100,000 people died of the plague; on the other hand, 80,000 cats and 80,000 dogs died (not because of the plague, but because of ignorance). With these statistics, anyone could say that this plague, was more than deadly…