Term Papers on Societys Reactions To Plagues

Term Paper Title	Societys Reactions To Plagues
# of Words	1593
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	6.37

Society's Reactions to Plagues

Through antiquity people have had predictable and consistent reactions to outbreaks of deadly plagues.  They try to distance themselves from the disease and falsely blame groups of people (usually minorities) as the cause.  Also, governments often downplay the seriousness of the situation.  But in the end medical science makes great strides in explaining and solving the problem.  This report will start by giving a little background information on three of the worst plague periods in history:  The Black Death of 1300's, the Influenza outbreak of 1918, and the AIDS epidemic we face today.  Then, using examples, it will show that individuals, political groups, and religious groups, separated by hundreds of years and thousands of miles, have the same basic emotional responses to the threat of a deadly bacteria or virus.
The bubonic plague, also known as the Black Death, ravaged the people of Europe from 1347 and 1350.  In four years it killed approximately 25 million people, or one third of Europe's population.  The plague was spread from fleas and rats to humans.  Because of unsanitary living conditions and the lack of medical knowledge, the plague spread viciously and was unrelenting.  Once infected with this deadly bacillus, victims suffered headaches, weakness, confusion, bruising, and fatigue.   After a few days the lymph nodes would swell which caused hemorrhaging, pain, and made the heart work harder to push blood through the swollen tissue.  As a result, the victim's nervous system collapsed and the last few days are spent in frenzied, hopeless thrashings as their skin turned black and their bodies stiffened.  People who feared being infected with the plague fled from their towns spreading the disease further.
In 1918, a form of influenza for which no cure was known swept across the world.  It was called the Spanish flu, and it killed 22 million to 30 million people, twice as many as were killed in all of World War 1.  The outbreak was not widely publicized in the US because most of the news reports were preoccupied with World War I.  Flu victims experienced vomiting, dizziness, hemorrhaging, and such profuse coughing that their lungs occasionally resembled "melted red currant jelly" before finally dying of respiratory distress.  Because the government and newspapers were downplaying the spread of the disease most people didn't feel vulnerable.  Sanitary practices of the time were still primitive compared to those of today and contributed to the swift and widespread infection of millions.
Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, is an epidemic that affects us today.  A person infected with AIDS gradually loses function of their T-cells, causing the themto become vulnerable to and die from pneumonia, fungal infections, and other common ailments.  In the early 1980s, deaths from common infections, previously only observed in organ transplant recipients, were recognized in otherwise healthy homosexual men.  The World Health Organization estimates that since 1981, when the first AIDS cases were reported, there have been 319,849 deaths from AIDS in the United States.  In 1995 an estimated 18.4 million people worldwide were living with HIV or AIDS.
People tend to fear what they don't understand - this was the case with all three plagues.  Those who don't have the disease (or don't think they do) don't want to be around people who are infected.  So they do one of two things: run away and distance themselves from the disease, or they destroy the people who do have the disease.  Both these reactions were observed in the Black Death.  When the town of Messina, Italy caught the plague, they realized it must have come from the sick and dying sailors in their port.  The townspeople drove the infected sailors back out to sea, inevitably spreading the plague even further.  Some of the people panicked and fled to neighboring towns, spreading the disease to other countries.  In the 1980's, when little was understood about the transmission of the disease, people with AIDS were ostracized from the re...

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