Question: how did the plague start and how did people survive it

Ruth Nottingham answered on 15 Jun 2014:

Bubonic plague (and the pneumonic plague) is caused by a bacteria called Yersinia pestis. The large outbreak of the plague in England happened in 1348-49 was also called ‘The Black Death’.

(I found this website fun 🙂
http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/broughttolife/themes/diseases/black_death.aspx)

The bacteria that causes plague infects rats, the fleas that live on rats can then also be infected. The infected fleas can then bite humans, and this is how humans got infected. In pneumonic plague the disease can be spread very quickly through infected people coughing.

It is thought to have started in the UK when an infected ship arrived into Bristol. Travel and trade is how a lot of diseases spread quickly across the world. Once it had arrived it managed to spread quickly as the living conditions at the time were crowded and there was not much pest control of rats. Also they did not have any knowledge of what was causing the illness so some of them tried to use religion or some very odd medicines to cure it! Eventually they isolated homes that were infected to try and stop it spreading.

It was a pretty nasty illness and killed one third of Europe.

How people survived is not totally known, people have slightly different immune systems (the bit of your body that helps to fight infection) to each other, which is to do with what genes you have, so some people may have been lucky to have a ‘better’ immune system so they didn’t get so sick. Other people may have been lucky not to have been near any town that had the disease- maybe they lived in the middle of nowhere.

Now we can treat this infection using antibiotics, also we now have a cleaner way of living and rat populations are controlled so we are not living in the same sort of way that people were in 1348! The illness is not seen in Europe any more – though it is sometimes seen in Africa and Asia.