Breaking News: Is the Black Death preparing to return and decimate humanity?
Breaking out in a short period, the Black Death pandemic claimed the lives of tens of millions of people in the 14th century, equivalent to 60% of the entire population of Europe. A leading scientist warns that if the Earth continues to warm at its current rate, deadly pandemics could return to haunt humanity.
The Black Death
In the early days of medical science, those who contracted the plague rarely survived. Photo: Getty.
The Black Death was a type of plague caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis and spread through large colonies of rodents. Such an area is called an "epicenter." Human outbreaks occur when rodents in human settlements, often black rats, become infected.
The Black Death spread across Europe between 1346 and 1353. However, this chilling name only appeared several centuries later. The Black Death (atra mors) is actually an ancient Greek phrase used in Classical Latin. It was originally used in poetry to signify the darkness and fear associated with death, not just a specific disease. |
The disease manifests as swollen lymph nodes throughout the body. When blood vessels in the lymph nodes rupture, the blood dries and turns into black clots, obstructing blood flow. Internal bleeding also occurs in organs such as the liver and lungs, leading to death. The disease can be transmitted from person to person through the respiratory tract and respiratory fluids.
At the height of the pandemic, many people on the streets used perfume to avoid smelling the stench of the dead. The disease spread so rapidly that corpses lay scattered in the streets, while others died at home, unnoticed until the smell of decay spread to their neighbors.
The Black Death can be described as a devastating pandemic for the world, and especially for Europe. An estimated 200 million people died from the disease, spanning from Europe to Asia. In England alone, half the population perished.
Plague continued to spread for another 300 years, including the great plague in London in 1665, which killed a quarter of the population. Despite the devastation it caused, plague could not last forever.
There are many reasons to explain this problem, for example, the decline in the number of rodent species or the successful development of a vaccine against the disease by Russian-Jewish physician Vladimir Havkin in the 19th century.
Is the pandemic returning?
The Black Death pandemic devastated Europe, fundamentally changing the way of life and culture of the continent afterward. Photo: Getty.
According to Daily Star Online, quoting Peter Frankopan, a professor of world history at the prestigious University of Oxford, global warming causing ice to melt will lead to dangerous pandemics like the Black Death.
Specifically, Frankopan argues that as permafrost melts, bacteria and pathogens that have been buried for thousands of years will be released into the environment. Furthermore, rising global temperatures will create an ideal environment for plague bacteria to thrive.
“In the 1340s, a 1.5°C increase in Earth’s temperature transformed a tiny bacterium into the Black Death pandemic,” Professor Frankopan explained, adding that the plague was a pandemic fueled by the last global temperature increase humanity experienced.
According to Daily Star Online, Frankopan's warning is considered well-founded, as a number of leading climate scientists had previously stated that humanity has only 12 years to prevent global warming from exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius. In a report submitted to the United Nations, these scientists asserted that rising temperatures would cause floods, droughts, extreme weather events, and push hundreds of millions into poverty.
