The Bubonic Plague Is Back

                Here’s a headline you never thought you’d see: “First ever documented bubonic plague case confirmed in Michigan.”

                Back to the future, or something like that. The plague, or Black Death, infamously wiped out roughly 1/3 of the population of Europe back in the mid 1300’s. The plague originated in Mongolia and China in the early 1300’s and is carried by fleas that infect rodents.

                Some experts claim an outbreak of the disease that occurred in San Francisco around 1900 “seeded the American rodent population,” and that all such cases of the disease in the U.S. have stemmed from that event. The disease is spread from urban rats to rural rodents, and can be contracted by humans in the vicinity of infected animals, alive or dead. The U.S. has averaged about seven cases per year, but this year the number has doubled.

                Some “experts” claim that, since millions of workers died in the Black Death, the price of labor was driven up in competition for the remaining ones, thereby greatly stimulating the European economies. (Hooray for Planned Parenthood! More funding…do it for the economy. But wait, stop those hordes of illegal aliens, build the fence now!).

                Some experts, however, claimed that so much death cheapened life, coarsened behavior and led to a dramatic rise in violence and insensitivity.

                See also, Planned Parenthood.