Slashdot Mirror
The Black Plague Batted .500 Its Rookie Year
ElDuderino44137 writes "Hey, kids, got the summer blues? The CIA isn't the only one with a kids' page to keep you busy. The Centers for Disease Control have the full set of collectible infectious disease trading cards. Mix 'em, match 'em, trade 'em, recoil in abject horror from 'em."
Something to go with my stuffed microbes!
MOM! Tommy got Ebola again! Tell him to share!
... gotta catch 'em all ;)
I don't know about you, but I am *so* not eating the bubblegum that comes with these!
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Here I thought that those "Most Awful Criminals" cards were in bad taste.
Reading the back of the Anthrax card, it's just propaganda for kids to show mommy and daddy so they won't defund the CDC.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
Get all of the cool toys. Why didn't they have this when I was growing up?
Perhaps off topic, but does anyone else remember going to the bookstore during the Camus section of senior-year english class and asking for The Plague?
No such thing as the "black plague" --
There is the Black Death, referring to a specific pandemic of Bubonic Plague in Europe in 1347-1350.
Moo.
More or less. The Black Death wiped out one-third to one-half of [any given European / West Asian / Middle Eastern geographical area], with the exceptions of Poland and Scotland, which didn't get touched.
Something to tell the next kid you find singing "ring around the rosey," a nursery rhyme about the Plague. :-)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
I don't get their criteria for giving out the cards. Some major-league diseases are missing like tuberculosis and cholera, but they give some small-time (yeah yeah it's not small if you've got it) diseases their own card. Damnit, I want a 1918 influenza card! It killed millions worldwide--a very pricey card I'm sure.
not all deaths attributed to the Black Death were from yersinia pestis, no argument there. With people dying in droves, almost any death at that time was attributed to The Black Death.
As for a hemorragic fever being responsible, it is of course possible but highly unlikely. It would have to be an extremely exotic fever as no known hemo fever can survive through the cold european winter.
Europe also was coming out of a time of extreme famine just prior to the onset of the Black Death, so its likely that many individuals were chronically malnourished with weakened immune systems. So, it wouldn't take anything more exotic than a foreign plague bacillus to really wreak havoc.
Moo.
I think this would have given me nightmares when I was a kid (check out page 2, with the thick white membrane in the throat of the Diptheria sufferer, or the backwards-bent leg of the Polio girl)... but I think the helpful translations of scientific words would have made up for it. This snippet (from the Cyclosporiasis blurb) is a fine example:
Yeah, I'm sure the kid knows what "contaminated" means... come on, guys. Though I will forgive them not trying to explain "diarrhea" using small words.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
Children quickly become fascinated with things that are a part (and sometimes a horrible part) of their lives. One could say that the purpose for children is to go forth and gather diseases from schools so that they might infect their parents. And so do adults, as in the case of the Black Death and the pandemics of bubonic plague that swept Europe.
A prime case of this type of fascination is in the art of the time, such as that of Hieronymus Bosch and others who began drawing images of intense suffering and disease.
The death caused by these pandemics may also be seen as beneficent, as it gave rise to increased rights for the peasantry, the creation of a "middle class" and the concept of general human rights, which lead to the end of the feudal system of governments. The nobility could no longer compel peasants to work their land just for their protection and the peasantry demanded actual pay for work.
This also gave rise to the general usage of sirnames that stuck throughout generations, as the kings would tax their noblemen on the basis of the potential in numbers of persons on their lands, instead of only on the size of their holdings. When the kings revenue collectors were faced with seventeen "Johns" they would assign names to them on basis of their employment, where they lived, or how they looked instead of who their father or master was.
One can usually find the etymology of one's sirname in the common tongue of this period.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
Since the discovery of Helicobacter pylori, which indeed causes ulcers.
The link I gave doesn't say so, but as far as I know it is strongly suspected that it is indeed contagiuous.