Over this past weekend, the presses were hot with news that a young man died in Colorado- of bubonic plague.
Taylor Gaes was 16, athletic, and in great physical health; he played baseball, football, and more. But he was shockingly taken by the bacterial infection septicemic plague.
What Is Certain
The bubonic plague has been in and out of human history more times than we can actually count. For historians, tracking the bubonic plague has been a game of chess. Old accounts aren’t always specific, or have been misplaced. It’s true that there have been many different spouts of plague, but the bubonic is marked by a telltale symptom: it travels through your lymph nodes.
This symptom is “buboes”–or swollen nodes in your groin and armpits. It’s is often cited in pieces as black nodules, giving the bubonic plague its famous name “The Black Death.”
But, the other symptoms of the bubonic plague are common in a lot other bacterial infections, such as:
Gangrene
High fever (and chills)
Seizures
And a score of other symptoms.
Which brings us back to the poor young man in Colorado- he only showed signs of a common cold.
As mentioned earlier, the Black Plague is a hard one to track down, historically speaking. But we can pinpoint certain cases.
Plague of Justinian:
Thanks to Procopius, we have a pretty good account of the Bubonic Plague in the Roman Empire, ca Emperor Justinian I. The history details the spread from port cities out into mainland. Supposedly, Justinian himself caught the scourge, but was miraculously healed.
The Middle Ages (aka The Big One):
This is the plague that everyone thinks about. It famously took out a third of the population for most of the the 14th century, and spread nearly everywhere it could.
The most recent outbreak was in the late nineteenth century, spreading into Southeast Asia and the Middle East. But deaths have been recorded as recently as 1994, and now 2015.
Should we be worried?
Absolutely not.
Taylor Gaes is thought to have been bitten by an infected flea. It is difficult to understand exactly how these seemingly random things happen. But even though the bubonic plague is alive and well, it is not the threat man has historically endured. Thanks to sanitation laws and modern medicine, the number of deaths caused by the bubonic plague continues to drop yearly. A far cry from medieval treatments, now all it takes is a stiff antibiotic within 24 hours of symptoms.
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Colorado Teen Dies Of Bubonic Plague; Should We Be Worried?
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