Ebola Battle Led by Larry, Curly, and Moe?

The population of Europe had outrun the food supply in the early 1300s, and in a few years, the poor were eating cats, dogs, and other animals. Some say they even ate their own children! People were dying, but rather slowly. Bubonic plague (Black Death) would prove to be more efficient and quicker than famine, much quicker.

The bubonic plague cut its way through the Far East to Italy, then to the rest of Europe. It is believed that Genoa merchants transported plague in their cargoes of spices, nutmeg, jewels, and silks. In Siena, 75% of the people were cut down like grain before the scythe, and about 75% also died at Pisa. As described in the Cronica Senese of Agnolo di Tura, “Father abandoned child, wife, husband, one brother, another....No one could be found to bury the dead for money or for friendship."

We are observing some of the same reactions regarding Ebola as health officials keep changing the narrative. The indecision of the “experts” is fueling the plague. First it is not airborne then it is airborne according to German doctors as reported in the Oxford University Press. The CDC agreed yesterday that Ebola can be contracted by a sneeze! The incubation period is 21 days, then 31 days, and some say 40 days. It seems health officials don’t know whether they are pitching or catching.

The virus can survive “a few hours” on an object and a “few days” in body fluids although now we are told at least one Ebola strain can live 50 days especially on a glass surface. It is not easy to catch, yet health workers dress in personal protective equipment (PPE) and still get the disease. Health workers are refusing to care for the dying and some are refusing to bury the dead in Africa. Even some U.S. health workers refuse to honor quarantine and spineless officials refuse to require it.

It seems Larry, Curly, and Moe are handling the Ebola threat with understandable results: Death is the result of ineptitude, incoherence, and incertitude. 

The poet Petrarch, called the “Father of Humanism,” reported about the effects of the plague on Florence: “We go out of doors, walk through street after street and find them full of dead and dying, and when we get home again we find no live thing within the house! All having perished in the brief interval of our absence.”

George Astor wrote, “Almost half of Europe died from the Black Death between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries.” The Black Death (bubonic plague) raged into Paris in June of 1348, and about the same time, it ravaged up and down the valleys of the Rhine and arrived in England, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. In 1360-61, 50% of the people in many Polish towns died! Lubeck, Germany saw 80,000 of its people swept away by the plague. In 1477-78, 30,000 died in Venice; 18,000 died in Vienna in 1542. London saw thousands die each week in 1563, 1592, and 1599. Spain was lashed by the plague in 1596-1602, when half a million people died! In 1603, when James I came to the throne, 38,000 people died in London; almost that number died in 1653.

Then the great plague lashed London again, and more than 68,600 died out of a population of 460,000. It all started slowly in London. Just before Christmas of 1664, two men died in Drury Lane, with a few additional deaths during the remainder of the winter. The next few months were months of beautiful weather in London, but not for people! As the temperature climbed, so did the death toll; however the town officials refused to admit the numerous deaths which is the charge made about Ebola. The rich and well connected began to flee the city. The College of Physicians left the city by the last of June, and the politicians and King Charles II fled in early July.

In the last week of August, over 7,500 people died, and the dead carts rolled through the streets each morning picking up those who had died during the night. The dead were taken to church cemeteries where huge holes had been dug and where the dead were thrown. Infected people threw themselves into the pit, and sought to bury themselves since death was so sure and dying was so painful. The plague spread from London to the rest of the country, and then disappeared after 1667.

By 1679, 76,000 people perished in Vienna and 83,000 in Prague during 1684. Moscow lost 57,000 people to the plague as late as 1771. In the mid-1800s, the bubonic plague raised its ugly head in China and skipped across the country. Almost 100,000 people died in Canton. It showed up in Bombay (30,000 deaths) and Calcutta in 1896 and in Japan and the Philippines the following year.

In 1899, the Black Death visited Hawaii, Central America, and South America. The next year saw it in Cape Town and San Francisco. Plague paid a visit to Egypt and Singapore in 1901. Bangkok played an unwilling host to the plague in 1904, Java in 1910, New Orleans in 1914, and Florida in 1922. About ten million people perished of bubonic plague between 1903 and 1921! Since then, it has only shown up periodically and has been contained, but the Black Death is on every continent of the earth at this very moment!

The preceding litany of deaths could be a portent of what the world faces if Ebola gets out of control or Muslim terrorists carry out their threats. No sane person thinks they are playing games. It is not demagoguery to suggest that the earth could become a mass graveyard!    

If major disease, disaster, and death visit America I’m afraid we will see the same result we witnessed in the past. Few seemed/seem to fear God or man. Honor was/is a forgotten concept.

And Larry, Curly, and Moe continue their silly, senseless, and stupid antics playing “doctors!”