this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2026
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Also, the Black Plague has not been eradicated. It still exists in small mammals such as gophers and rats, and a strain could potentially mutate to humans again, although changes in human hygiene have made blood to blood infections less common.
The reason it seemed to disappear is because the more infectious and fatal strains spread to and killed off every susceptible human at a rate that could not support its propagation to new healthy humans.
It actually still exists in people too, it's just rare and treatable.
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/seriously-dont-worry-about-the-plague
Plague: Then vs now
It's rare because we have higher hygiene standards. Basically washing our hands eliminated the black plague.
I'm just going to Edit this comment because I don't feel the need to explain to every idiot commenting "ACKSTUALLY."
My comment was an over simplification. By having higher hygiene standards we reduced our contact with rats and other things that can carry it. It is essentially “We did A, which caused B through G, which lead to less of H.”
More like fleas and other biting insects are more rare, and people generally do not tolerate sleeping around non-pet rats. It's more living conditions than hygene.
That’s not how it was spread, not really. It was spread by fleas and other blood to blood contact if the person had the bubonic plague and, in later stages, through the air in close contact via infectious respiratory droplets if the person had the pneumonic plague.
My comment was an over simplification. By having higher hygiene standards we reduced our contact with rats and other things that can carry it. It is essentially "We did A, which caused B through G, which lead to less of H."
Your comment was partially incorrect. I corrected you. While it was a matter of hygiene, washing hands had little to nothing to do with it. You didn’t mention anything about rats or the fleas they carried, which were the primary carrier of the bubonic plague
I implore you to understand what an over simplification statement mean in regard to a multi step process that took centuries of understanding what to do and not to do. What conditions are considered acceptable now vs 700 years ago and so on.
In an era of anti-vox bullshit, it's not acceptable to be that incorrect in your "oversimplification".
An oversimplification doesn't mean you get to make completely false statements. An oversimplification ignores other significant factors to end up with a simple statement that for the most part is true.
This is an acceptable oversimplification.
This is not because this is just factually wrong.
The latter is what is being corrected. Now apply your smartass education and understand when you're wrong.
If you don't understand how the basic concept of washing your hands (which at the time was just splashing your hands in dirty water) stems from having a higher understanding better quality standards of living, like not sleeping with the farm animals for warmth, shitting in the street, or bathing in dirty water, all of which can cause rats, fleas, and ticks to rampage an area, then that's on you.
I can't teach you cause and effect of dealing with a long term systemic issue caused by a multitude of factors and variables.
What you're saying is B stems from A, and A causes C therefore we can say B causes C. But it is correlation, not causation and a pretty surprising thing to say
This is supposition. If you have any reliable sources to back up these claims that washing one’s hands had any actual or meaningful effect on the spread of the black plague, please cite them.
Holy shit you people are fucking stupid. That's not what I said and I've already spelled it out for you.
You did say that.
You did not provide any evidence to back up your claims. You are not a reliable source.
I understand what “oversimplification” means. You do not seem to understand what “incorrect“ means.
Got a rodent problem? Just wash your hands!
Sure would have been nice to know this when my house got invested with fleas. No need to flea bomb, I just needed to wash my hands!
(got a pup from a household with inadequate flea control measures--they'd give him a flea bath weekly, but never treated the environment or their cats. They swore up and down he didn't have fleas.)
I take it you just have the pup, so this tip might be for any cat owners passing by:
I've found to treat cats for fleas the best method is a flea comb and a tub of very bubbly soapy water.
The cat doesn't go in the water, instead you sit the cat on your lap, comb it's fur gently with the flea comb, and when you spot a flea on the comb, you dunk it in the bubbly soapy water.
...the slimey soapy bubbles capture the fleas, and make it a lot harder for them to escape. Turns a traumatic soggy moggy time, into a nice gentle combing kill session.
I assume you mean well, but this is serious "confidently incorrect" energy. Yersinia pestis, the bacteria that causes bubonic plague, never changed to become less virulent and can still affect humans to this day. It has been killing a ton of humans for thousands of years and was still killing thousands of people at a time in localized outbreaks up until we discovered the antibiotics that cure it.
Also, it's transmitted through the fleas on small mammals, not through the mammals themselves. Flea transmission is far and away the primary vector. Human to human transmission has always been pretty rare, since it can only be transmitted between humans through contact with bodily fluids, similar to how HIV spreads.
Plague Inc. has taught me how to be more effective and prevent this from happening.
Evolve Necrosis FTW. Gotta have corpse-to-living tx. The real problem with plague inc. is the motivation though the disease is likely dead one turn after humanity.
This is where we need a conspiracy theory that all complex life is just an intricate biological shell/animate castle-o-saurus, designed to protect and nourish a few self replicating acids, with defense mechanisms to try to kill any interlopers that seek to replicate faster without dissuading anything sexually compatible.
Sounds like the novel Parasite Eve which inspired a movie and later videogame series. Basically it piggy backs on the concept of Mitochondrial Eve wherein Mitocondria evolved separately from all other cellular life and exists as a symbiotic organism.