In the fall of 1347, a boat docked in Messina, Sicily, confirming the doubt that had been lingering in the back of everyone's minds, too horrible to be credible until then. Rumors circulated of a plague that had spread across Asia and the Middle East, mowing down people like wheat in a field. It was only when the boat arrived at the port with dead people on board that this was proven true. However, the ship wasn't just carrying dead sailors. It also brought with it rats and the beginning of a pandemic that within a few years would kill approximately twenty-five million people and leave a fear in their hearts so great that it has lasted to this day (Perlin). Today, although we are not yet as affected by this bacterial disease, we are plagued by another virus known as Ebola. Comparing the two diseases, they are quite similar in many aspects. What they have most in common, however, is the way ignorance has led to the rapid spread of disease. Whether it is the handling of rats or bats, Catholicism or African superstition, misinformed and well-meaning doctors, or even the level of poverty, it would seem that ignorance is more deadly than the infection itself. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Yersinia pestis, or bubonic plague, was stowaway aboard the ship landing in Messina, and also on ships traveling to Marseille, a city in southern France, and Tunis, a popular port in Africa. By 1353 it had spread to the northern tip of Scandinavia and made its way through the western half of Russia (Nelson). It goes without saying that the 14th century was not as equipped with technology as we are in the 21st. The Renaissance was beginning in Europe, yet people were still stuck in the Middle Ages, relying on old ways to get through daily life. Although the Crusaders brought soap with them from Asia and the Middle East, people did not always have access to hot water for bathing. Most cities adopted the Roman idea of ​​public baths, but because of all the wood needed to keep the water hot, it became too expensive to continue using them. Although people enjoyed bathing, they were unable to stay clean, becoming accustomed to living in dirt and dirt. As time passed, people began to think that being too clean was unwise, believing that Vikings were neurotic about bathing once a week (Konieczny). They did what they had to do, even if it meant throwing waste into the streets, unlike members of the upper classes who were blessed with a proper toilet. Furthermore, there were said to be three rats per family and each of these rats carried five fleas (Robertshaw). With such a high parasite population and such a restorative standard of cleanliness, the bubonic plague spread at an astonishing rate. As modern medicine tells us today, the best environment for an epidemic to start is often the least sanitary. In a world where exterminators are humble servants who have no idea what they are doing, where doctors you trust are more likely to spread infection than cure it, and people in cities are like sardines in a can, it is not difficult to imagine a There is an epidemic occurring. However, it seems impossible that one disease could cause so much damage. While this may be true, people forget that, like most diseases, the bubonic plague had more than one strain. The epidemic that began in 1347 was a combination of three strains: one that attacked the lymph nodes and caused buboes,one that affected the respiratory system like pneumonia and one that infected the blood (Nelson). While individually each strain is deadly on its own, the combination of all of them has contributed to the high case fatality rate and widespread spread across the continent. Symptoms varied depending on the strain and resulted in, among other things, buboes or pustules that ranged in size from the size of an egg in an apple, swollen lymph nodes, red face, bruised skin, high fever, cough, and vomiting; most people succumbed to the disease, dying within three or four days (Nelson). In the southern French city of Avignon, it was reported that 400 people died every day and that over the course of six weeks, one cemetery received over 11,000 bodies. (Dutch). With the death toll rising substantially every day, monks and priests instead began to employ the use of mass graves as they were both easier to dig and could hold more bodies. Killing a third of the population in the space of two years tends to leave a trail of bodies so vast that it is almost impossible to bury them all. In fact, one in three people died from the epidemic (Knox). Known as plague pits, mass graves were filled with the corpses of already infected people, literally the living dead. In London, Charterhouse Square, one of the largest and best-known plague pits, stands to this day as a monastery dedicated to the souls who never got their last rights in the chaotic years of the epidemic (History). Even if it represents something more; it is the symbol of a plague so widespread and lethal that, sometimes, in the heat of the moment, we have forgotten that the deceased were people too. Despite the fact that the last widespread outbreak of the Black Death occurred in the 1600s, we are still plagued by many other diseases that affect us just as widely today, such as Ebola. Named after the Ebola River in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the former country of Zaire, the modern plague got its bloody start during two separate, though simultaneous, epidemics, the other occurring in the city of Nzara in Sudan. In mid-September 1976, two dozen cases of an unidentified disease were reported at a small Catholic mission hospital in the town of Yambuku, fourteen of whom died (Quammen). Dr. Karl Johnson, head of the CDC's Special Pathogens Section at the time, determined that the disease was actually a virus similar to Marburg, but different in its own right. However, he had no idea which animal was the reservoir host, nor which animal the disease resided in before transmitting to humans and therefore had very little information about how it was transmitted. After the first outbreaks in Yambuku and Nzara, Ebola disappeared for fifteen years before reappearing in another location in Zaire, called Kikwit. It differed from the first epidemic in one crucial way: it was a thriving metropolis of 200,000 people with several well-equipped hospitals while Yambuku was a small village with a tiny hospital-like clinic for minor emergencies (Quammen). The outbreak in Kikwit began on January 6, 1995, the first reported case was a farmer living five miles south of town, who died later that week. The CDC confirmed it was Ebola on May 9 of that year. Three months later, in August, at the end of the epidemic, 245 people had died and the disease had disappeared again. According to David Quammen, acclaimed science writer and traveling journalist, "he was Jack the Ripper: dangerous, invisible, missing." Now, fortunately, we know more about Ebola, although we don't yet know what the host reservoir specifically is. What we do know, however, is that it can be transmitted between mammals, that is, through blood or body fluids, contaminated objects such as needles or syringes,infected animals and wild animal meat or wild animals killed illegally for food. According to Jennifer Connolly, an infection control specialist who works at St. Mary's Regional Medical Center in the infection control department, “It's not as contagious as you might think. But as we look at Africa, we also look at secondary healthcare systems. … Many families are caring for their loved ones.” People who live with and care for an infected loved one, have come into direct contact with a dead body, or have had direct contact with an infected person, even a person's blood or body fluids are at high risk of contracting the disease (evaluation of CDC). “It's very similar to HIV. It has to get into an open wound or an open orifice,” Connolly says of transmission. As discussed above with Plague, most diseases have more than one strain, and Ebola is no exception. There are five different strains, each of which is named after the area of ​​origin: Zaire ebolavirus, Sudan ebolavirus, Tai Forest (formerly Ivory Coast) ebolavirus, Bundibugyo ebolavirus and Reston ebolavirus, the incubation period for all of which is between two and twenty-one days. Until the time a person starts showing symptoms, they are not contagious (CDC Top). Once they start showing common symptoms such as fatigue, fever, abdominal pain, headache or ache throat, are contagious. This may be accompanied by nausea and vomiting, diarrhea, rash, kidney and liver failure, and potential internal and/or external bleeding, although this is unlikely (Ebola). Zone of Richard Preston talking about the Ebola outbreak at a research laboratory in Reston, West Virginia, some of these symptoms are highly exaggerated. For example, even if conjunctival injection is a possible symptom, you are more likely to get conjunctivitis than cry tears of blood. His book fueled the fear in the hearts of Americans that Ebola was a cursed hemorrhagic fever and that the epidemic in the Reston laboratory was only the beginning. In reality, however, the Reston ebolavirus is the only strain that does not transmit to humans (Kogan). Once again, people get too caught up in the moment, thinking that the world is ending because once again we are exposed to disease contagion. When people think about history repeating itself, they often think about the rise and fall of governments and wars. exploding. They don't always consider that epidemics can occur more than once. The outbreak of the Black Death in 1347 is reminiscent of the Ebola epidemic that broke out in West Africa last year not only in its high mortality rate. Both outbreaks started following contact with infected animals or a zoonosis. “Each reflects the action of a pathogen that can spread to people of other species,” writes David Quammen in the prologue to his book Ebola: The Natural and Human History of a Deadly Virus. While the bubonic plague was the result of living with and around black rats, which have since become extinct in Britain (Robertshaw), Ebola is the result of contact with wild meat or dead primates (Ebola). Furthermore, both diseases spread from person to person during the burial of the dead, although during the Middle Ages only other infected people handled the corpses, so no one else would have been at risk. When asked how people in West Africa treat their deceased loved ones, Jennifer Connolly responded: “there is a team over there that you should respond to and tell them and they will come and get the body for you and bury it. " However, this is not always done since people in a.