“The number of deaths from violence will be far exceeded by deaths from cold and hunger. The total casualty list will include a remarkable number of deaths in hospitals. Some millions of people will die in the two weeks during which the crisis will last. With hygiene virtually absent, an epidemic will be the widespread new phenomenon causing more deaths. This will be the decisively lethal fact – half the surviving population will die of bubonic plague. Historians estimate that during the fourteenth century the plague destroyed half to two thirds of the population of Europe. We think of that as long ago and far away, and we cannot help thinking that the plague is one of history’s horrors, unknown in the modern world for about 170 years. But as Hans Zissner wrote in Rats, Lice and History, ‘We have no satisfactory explanation for the disappearance of plague epidemics from the Western countries and we must assume that in spite of the infectiousness of the plague-bacillus, the plentiness of rats their occasional infection with plague and their invariable infestation with fleas, the evolution of an epidemic requires a delicate adjustment of many conditions which have fortunately failed to eventuate in Western Europe and America during the last (nineteenth) century. The most reasonable clue lies in the domestication of rats. Plague epidemics in man are usually preceded by widespread epizootics among rats; and under the conditions of housing, food storage, cellar construction, and such that have gradually developed in civilized countries, rats do not migrate through cities and villages as they formerly did. Plague foci among rats remain restricted to individual families and colonies’.” – Roberto Vacca, The Coming Dark Age
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