Waiting for the next Plague: the possibility of an epidemiological Armageddon.

A recent study, performed by the renowned and privately founded Polska Tehnologitsal Instytut Dziejowy Nauk- The Polish Technological Institute of historical sciences- has uncovered a rather startling byproduct of the Black Plague.

A sample from tree bark and sediment found in ice caps, has determined that, during the mid 14th the century, carbon dioxide was at an all time high. The increase level of CO2 in the atmosphere, and the sheer amount of the chemical compound, per square cubic feet, let to a decrease of temperature highs.

This cutback on warm weather, and absolute decline of favorable calefaction, held the world on the cusp of a new never-ending ice age. 

Scholars, are right now, proposing that the causes is all to clear. They believe, that do to the widespread migration of the Black Plague during 1346-53 and, above all, the 80% mortality this great pestilence held, logging and deforestation had been virtually paralyzed.

A triumph for nature, but an unfavorable blowback for mankind.

‘You have to understand’, remarked Doctor Albin Biedrzycki when approached about his comities experimental findings. ‘The powerful outbreak ended up killing, in less than 3 years, an estimated of almost 200 million people. One could even qualify it as a small flash extinction event. It spread like wild fire over Asia and Europe, using the Silk Road as it preferred highway. To this day, we’re certain, that we lack a greater genetic diversity, in our collective biological pool, thanks to this horrible disease. For Epidemiologist, the true turning point of human civilization, the before and after of our development, was the Black Plague. Every branch of our being was severely trimmed during this period. Human evolution simply stopped, arrested in mount of its dead, it was almost a miracle we managed to survive and, finally, prosper from such an apocalypse. As a species we didn’t even have the power, or the numbers, to chop down a couple three. Townships were deserted and landscape took back what was once their’s. Factoring into account that there were so many unmolested plants and growing vegetation now, on Earth, the photosyntetical process flew into overdrive... If you add that to the noxious fumes and billowing plumes of black smoke, we were producing from large funeral pyres, you suddenly have a recipe for an atmospheric conversion; a reversal to a more primitive state. We simply didn’t have the strength to make mother Earth habitable... We were children, in the middle of winter, who couldn’t even lit a fire to save their lives.’

When asked: ‘Why has this ‘ice age’ never repeated itself through the bubonic plague’s history?After all, hasn’t that pandemic illness scourged the human race a number of times?’

‘My dear, there in lies a truly spooky story. This is the sort of saga that has the whole scientific community in a professional crossroads; divided, right in the middle, by their beliefs. As few know, the Great Death, as it was originally called, began in the Gobi Desert. It only spread to Europe, and out of that arid environment because, in a way, it was the fist biological weapon ever deployed. It was the initial, and most deadly, act of germ warfare in the history of mankind. A regimen of Tartar raiders had hemmed in, and blockaded, a Genoese outpost on the outskirts of their territory. They immediately began to die from a sickness they had transported out of the dessert. In order to destroy their enemies, and as a final assault, they commenced to catapult infected soldiers over the fortifications. Ironically, the Italians thanked God for smithing down these heathens; they saw only ludicrous acts of madness and suicide runs in the brutes’s deadly actions. 

When the bandits all perished, the Genoese saddled their horses and began the long trek home; unknowingly spreading everywhere, the illness that was cooking inside their bodies. The merchant vein, known as ‘The Silk Road’, rapidly advanced the transmission of the plague; dispersing it affliction with absolute ease.

Now, here is were scientist bifurcate, objectively we have never been able to actually study that monster that came out of the dusty Gobi. We have taken only samples, and dried up fragments, be not a life specimen. What we have been able to put under a microscope, and freshly dissect, are later strains of that demon. We are now, almost, 100% certain that a small bacterium called: Yersinia pestis, a tiny rod-shaped organism, is the causes for the Bubonic Plague. It’s an agent that latched itself to the intestinal track of other animals; primarily blood sucking flees. 

So there, the end... Right? Unfortunately, no. Like I said, we know the culprit of the Bubonic, but not of The Black Plague. You see, there in lies the riddle that has, and mind you I know its in bad taste this next addendum, plagued us. Is the Bubonic Plague the same phenomenon that killed almost 2/3 of civilization in those ghastly 3 years? 

It only has a 60% mortality rate, compared to the 80%, that I previously mentioned. The bubos, or black boils, that so condemned one of its victims to death, were not limited, in the Black Plague, to the groin area. The acute vomiting and fever, in overall, is also quite lesser in the Bubonic. It looks like a duck, and sound like one, but it might very well be a swan. A large portion of us hypothesize that the original outbreak was a different kind of biological entity; a different virulent.

Some scientist believe that those descriptions are only an exaggeration, in part, of the only highly unreliable text and reports from those ancient days. A lesser branch considers that the Great Malady was, in itself, a mixture of Bubonic with a viral hemorrhagic fever, something along the lines of Ebola. The Haensch study, which surveyed and investigated the D.N.A. evidence of mass burial sites, has determined that: ‘Y. Pestis, was responsible... But a variant that may no longer exist’.

As you can see we are all of different opinions.

Worst, its that last study,which I just quoted, and similar theories, that cloud the sunshine and produce the C.D.C’.s nightmare scenario. It is all summed up in one three later word, inserted inside a conclusion of The Haensch paper; those tiny units of language send a shiver of dread down everyone’s spine. Let’s reread that last sentence: ‘... that MAY no longer exist’.

If you stop to think about it. If you begin to contemplate such terms as hibernation, cryogenics, mutation, dormant, manipulations, that MAY suddenly ruins your outlook and freezes your blood.

Excerpt: The Wraith of The Obelisk- L.J. Gomez.