Bubonic Plague
THE BLACK DEATH, OR BUBONIC PLAGUE “I know histhry isn’t thrue, Hinnissy, because it ain’t like what I see ivry day in Halsted Street. If any wan comes along with a histhry iv Greece or Rome that’ll show me th’ people fightin’, gettin’ dhrunk, makin’ love, gettin’ married, owin’ th’ grocery man an’ bein’ without hard coal, I’ll believe they was a Greece or Rome, but not befur.” — Dunne, Finley Peter, OBSERVATIONS BY MR. DOOLEY, New York, 1902 An infectious virus, according to Peter Medewar, is a piece of nucleic acid surrounded by bad news. This is what the virus carried by the female Culicidae Aëdes aegypti mosquito, causing what was known as black vomit, the American plague, yellow jacket, bronze John, dock fever, stranger’s fever (now standardized as the “yellow fever”) actually looks like, Disney-colorized for your entertainment: And this is what the infectious virus causing Rubeola, the incredibly deadly and devastating German measles, looks like, likewise Disney-colorized for your entertainment: Most infectious viruses have fewer than 10 genes, although the virus that caused the small pox was the biggie exception, having from 200 to 400 genes: HDT WHAT? INDEX BUBONIC PLAGUE THE BLACK DEATH Then, of course, there is the influenza, which exists in various forms as different sorts of this virus mutate and migrate from time to time from other species into humans — beginning with an “A” variety that made the leap from wild ducks to domesticated ducks circa 2500 BCE. (And then there is our little friend the coma bacillus Vibrio cholerae, that occasionally makes its way from our privies into our water supplies and causes us to come down with the “Asiatic cholera.”) On the other hand, the scarlet fever, also referred to as Scarlatina, is an infection caused not by a virus but by one or another of the hemoglobin-liberating bacteria, typically Streptococcus pyogenes.
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