Comparing the AIDS Epidemic and The Plague :: Compare Contrast Disease Health Essays

Comparing the back up Epidemic and The PlagueThe destruction and devastation caused by the Black Death of the Middle Ages was a phenomenon left to wonder at in text books of historical Europe. An unbeatable plague swept the continent taking as much as eighty percent of the European creation along with it (Forsyth). Today the public is plagued with a similar deadly disease. The back up epidemic continues to be incurable. In an essay written by David Herlihy, entitled Bubonic Plague Historical Epidemiology and the medical checkup Problems, the historic bubonic plague is compared withthe actual support epidemic of today. jibe to his research, acquired immune deficiency syndrome will probably prove to be the plague of the millennium (Herlihy p. 18). If sensation compares the epidemiology and social impact of these diseases they prove to be quite similar. The current AIDS epidemic has the potential to be the most dangerous and baneful plague of the millennium. No one knows exa ctly how the AIDS virus erupted. However, one presently dominant theory states that AIDS originated from monkeys in Africathat communicate the human immunodeficiency virus virus to humans through bites (Forsyth). As heap migrated it reached Haiti and then beam to America (Clark p. 65). The bubonic plague, too, was a spontaneous epidemic. The Black Death occurred because a bacillus was carried by fleas that fed off the blood of humans and transmitted the deadly bacillus in the process (Packer). It began in China and give out bymigration throughout all of Europe and even America (Forsyth). Efforts to insure both diseases were entirely unsuccessful. AIDS is now an international problem as wasthe bubonic plague. Like the bubonic plague did in the Middle Ages, AIDS is spreading at an alarming rate. In 1994 seventeen trillion people around the world were give with the HIV virus that causes AIDS, and four one thousand million had developed the disease (Packer). It is estimated that by the year 2000 more than forty million people, ninety percent in developing countries will be infected (Packer).The Black Death of the Middle Ages exterminated a third of the population of Europe in just four years. Also, like the bubonic plague, AIDS was once only found among certain delineated social groups (Herlihy p. 18) medicine abusers and homosexuals in this country and in prostitutes and their contacts in Africa. Due to the early epidemiology of AIDS cases, it was believed that only certain populations in specific areas were infected. Aids may occupy started out in small communities, but it spread quickly and widely.