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Light Off An Ebola Corolla


Light Off An Ebola Corolla
Some months ago I fought my way through a portion of  The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio’s 700-page, 14th century exposé of human nature. A doorstop? Yes. Boring? Not entirely. I gained tongue-clicking insight into the mores of that century’s wild and crazy upper crust of society. Perhaps their devil-may-care attitude may have been a last-ditch response to the horror of Italian life Boccaccio described in the introduction: a synapse-numbing depiction of how the black plague killed 65% of Florence’s 80,000 inhabitants in 1348-1349. Those were not happy times.
During the four-year period when the black plague raged throughout Europe, ignorance and fear reigned. Residents in some locations fought the disease by attacking, killing, or burning alive members of any group deemed responsible: Jews and Gypsies (always unfortunate targets), anyone with a skin malady (the original heartache of psoriasis), foreigners, and refugees. One also imagines timely elimination of difficult in-laws, demanding landlords, and tax collectors.
During Boccaccio’s black plague, the cycle occurred in the following manner:
1.     Rats became infected with the plague bacteria, Yersinia pestis
2.     Fleas bit the rats.
3.     Rats died from the infection.
4.     Ever wanting blood, the fleas sought new hosts.
5.     Fleas bit humans.
6.     The cycle continued among man and his animals.
The plague likely began in China when fleas fed on infected rats. The rats stowed away on westbound cargo ships while flea-bitten human traders traveled the Silk Road with their goods. The black plague—named for the dark sores associated with bleeding and blackening of the skin around lymph gland areas in the groin, armpits, or necks of infected persons—killed an estimated 25 million people in Europe and 75 million world-wide during a its four year reign of terror. Approximately 50% of Europe’s population succumbed to the bacteria-generated disease. In spite of our Eurocentric mindset, fatality percentages were lower in England and higher in Mediterranean countries. Nonetheless, when Shakespeare wrote the line, “A plague o’ both your houses!” he understood the mortality of the disease.
Always with us, bacteria are single-celled microorganisms that were among the first life forms to exist on earth and can be found everywhere: in soil, water, and many environments we normally consider hostile to life, for example, radioactive waste or on-board spaceships. Bacteria can be spherical, rod or spiral shaped, or variations in between, with a micro-level size barely a percent or two of the width of a human hair.
Yersinia pestis, one of the A rod-shaped bacteria, causes three kinds of plague: black (or bubonic) plague in the lymph nodes, septicemic plague in blood vessels, and pneumonic plague in the lungs. There are two other kinds of plague, but they have different causes; cholera, infection of the small intestine, is caused by a different bacterium, while yellow fever is a viral disease transmitted by mosquitoes.
Modern society has not escaped its fear of plague-like pandemics. The so-called Spanish flu virus of 1918-1919 killed an estimated 50 to 100 million people worldwide, with a ten to twenty percent death rate. Influenza again killed another two million in 1957 and one million in 1968. Deaths from AIDS, another viral disaster, total approximately 1.7 million since the first case in 1959, with about 34 million still living with the disease.
Today we fear Ebola haemorrhagic fever, with a current death count of 4,000. The W.H.O. predicts as many as 20,000 may be infected by November, and death rates run between 20% and 90%, depending upon geographical location. Fortunately, modern medicine is better equipped to cope, but with 24-hour news channels and Americans generally ignorant of science, we fret and worry. Will we soon greet passengers from overseas flights with pitchforks and torches? One only needs slight imagination to envision cleansing bonfires in small towns throughout America; it’s always been the Christian thing to do.
The End

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