Black Death

You may hear the term "black death" or "plague" from time to time. What are people referring to. Between the years of 1347 to 1353 at least 33% of Europe's population died due to the black death, a bacterial infection caused by Yersina pestis. People think the world is coming to an end due to today's current events, imagine if one out of every three people you knew died. Europeans at this time thought that the world was about to end due to all of these deaths. Yersinia pestis is a gram-negative rod-shaped bacterium that can travel from animals to fleas to humans. This bacterium is a facultative anaerobe and belongs to the Enterobacteriaceae family. Mice carried to Europe on merchant ships were infected with this bacteria, fleas bit the mice. The fleas would then regurgitate the infected blood onto human skin. Once the human was infected the bacteria spread like wildfire throughout Europe. In September of 2009 a researcher at the University of Chicago was infected with this bacteria and eventually died. Labconco, Bel-Art, and EMD Chemicals all provide laboratory supplies used in Yersinia pestis research.