A Terrifying Disease
During the COVID-19 shutdown, a frightening news report started spreading on social media. Authorities in China announced that one of their citizens had come down with bubonic plaque.
Immediately people started to panic.
A Dark History
The Black Death wiped out 30-50% of the people living in Europe over a 4 year period, from 1347 to1351. The bacteria, Yesina pestis, spread in two ways. Bubonic plague occurred when an infected flea bit a human. In the Middle Ages rats carried these disease-causing fleas everywhere. Or the more deadly form of this disease—pneumonic plague—spread by coughing and entered the victim’s lungs directly. The mortality rate for the airborne plague was much higher. Sometimes people would sicken in the evening and be dead the next morning.
Masked Healers
Unfortunately lesser outbreaks of the plague reoccurred every few generations. No one knew about disease-causing microscopic germs. But everyone quickly realized a person nursing a 
plague victim soon became sick too. By the 1600s and 1700s, plague doctors started to wear gloves, leather robes and strange bird-like masks for protection. They’d fill the beak with fragrant flowers and herbs to avoid breathing “the bad air” coming from the sick and dying.
It didn’t work.
Fleeing the Plague
The only way to avoid the plague was to escape to a “plague-free” countryside. Of course that didn’t always work because many fleeing people brought the disease with them.
Nothing stopped the plague during the middle ages. It came back again and again. It also ravaged India, China and Syria, Persia and Egypt, along with other parts of Africa. There was no cure.
Unfortunately, now we have jet travel. A pandemic can spread around the globe quicker than anytime in history. If bubonic plague ever came to the United States, what would we do? How would we save the people we love?
Fortunately, there’s nothing to worry about.
Surprisingly, a handful of cases of bubonic plague show up in New Mexico and a few other western states every year, because plague-carrying fleas and rats live here in the U.S.
But these cases don’t even make the national news.
Why?
Because we can now kill the plague-causing bacterium easily.
A Powerful Modern Defense
Human scientists didn’t create the first antibiotic; God did.
Our Creator blessed a simple fungus with a powerful weapon; which it used successfully against it’s encroaching bacterial “foes.”
Then early in the 20th century, God made a Scottish bacteriologist named Alexander Fleming notice.
On September 28, 1928, Dr. Fleming came back from a 2-week vacation to find a small accident had occurred in his lab. Because of carelessness, one of the petri dishes in which he’d been growing a pure strain of staphylococcal bacteria had become contaminated with mold spores.
But as he started to throw the contaminated petri dish away, the scientist noticed something odd. Around each mold colony, Fleming saw a circular clear space where the bacteria couldn’t grow. The mold, Penicillium notatum, excreted a substance which quickly destroyed the encroaching bacteria. He called this unknown substance “mold juice.”
Discovering the 1st Antibiotic
Fleming eventually renamed the mold juice “penicillin” and started actively culturing that particular mold. Through experimentation the doctor discovered it killed several disease-causing bacteria. Later, chemists figured out how to mass-produce large quantities, making this new biological weapon widely available to the medical community
Penicillin, the world’s 1st antibiotic, kills the bacteria which caused diphtheria, scarlet fever, gonorrhea, meningitis and pneumonia.. Now for the first time, these life-threatening diseases could be cured. Soon scientists discovered several other “naturally occurring” antibiotics.
Our loving Creator placed these life-saving substances in nature for us to find, in His perfect time.
The positive effect of this new weapon against germ warfare was immediate.
During combat, more soldiers died of infections than they did from enemy fire. But after penicillin became widely available, deaths from bacterial pneumonia dropped from 18% in the 1st World War to 1% during World War II, saving thousands and thousands of soldiers’ lives.
Bubonic Plague: a Scourge Removed
Public health officials in the U.S. diagnose bubonic plague quickly, solving the problem. This horrible disease which terrorized mankind for centuries can now be easily cured using antibiotics.
On average 1 to 7 people in the United States catch the plague every year. But we don’t hear about it because they get well and the plague doesn’t start to spread in a community.
My Spiritual Point
During the corona virus lock-down, social media exploded in debates about certain medical breakthroughs. I soon noticed that some people started speaking out against antibiotics, saying “We don’t need them” or “Antibiotics are bad.”
Today I’ve given you a glimpse of our world, before Dr. Fleming’s discovery. There was no treatment or cure in the Middle Ages which worked against this deadly bacterium. A flea bite could kill you.
So let me finish my question.
Bubonic Plague or Antibiotics? (Choose 1)
the answer is obvious, isn’t it? So the next time you hear someone arguing against antibiotics, feel free to share the truth; Jesus’ gift of antibiotics rescues us from several historically deadly diseases. especially bubonic plague.
And if they’re Christ-followers, I hope they’ll stop cursing God’s blessing.
These images were downloaded from Pixabay.com.
Editor’s note: The 1st image was a cartoon of the corona virus which causes COVID-19. The 2nd image of the masked plague doctor was a costume created for the annual Carnivale in Venice, Italy.
Resources:
A video titled How You Could Have Survived the Plague
How 5 of History’s Worst Plagues Finally Ended.
