What causes the Bubonic Plague and how deadly is it?
The Bubonic plague is a disease of the lymphatic system caused from the bite of an infected flea. The fleas are often found on rodents and seek live hosts (such as humans) when their rodent hosts die. Once established, bacteria rapidly spread to the lymph nodes and multiply. Yersinia pestis can resist phagocytosis and even reproduce inside phagocytes and kill them. As the disease progresses, the lymph nodes can hemorrhage and become necrotic. Bubonic plague can progress to lethal septicemic plague in some cases. Bubonic Plague kills about 50% of infected patients within one week. What most people reading this were probably searching for is actually the Black Death, a specific incident of a Bubonic Plague epidemic that happened in Europe in the 1340s. At the time of the breakout, the world’s population is estimated to have been about 450 million. The Black Death killed about 75 million, or roughly one sixth of the population on Earth. Compare those figures to today’s population and that
