2. How to Create a Black Death (Bubonic Plague): Ten Phases By: Brennan Appleman A Period

3. Phase 1: The Time Machine The first item you will need to create a Black Death is a time machine. It does not matter whether you build your own or buy a brand new time machine. My only advice is that you get one. The reason for getting a time machine is to go back to a time when there was no cure for the plague. The Black Death started in the fourteenth century, so you have to go back to the early 1300s so that people have not experienced the disease and have no immunity. This is one of the most important steps to make your disease a success.

4. Phase 2: The Bacteria Now is the time to obtain the bacteria. The bacteria that created the bubonic plague (Black Death) is the Yersinia pestis. It is a bacteria usually found in certain rodents and in fleas that have been on rodents. Obtaining this bacteria may be difficult. You have to make sure you have rodents that contain the bacteria. A scientist may be able to assist you by testing the organisms for the bacteria. If you do not have the organisms with the bacteria, then you will just be spreading an infestation of fleas and rodents instead of the disease.

5. Phase 3: The Fleas Fleas. The fleas are the organisms that will transport your bacteria/disease to other rodents and people after they obtain the disease from infected rodents. If some fleas have the disease and bite you, you will then be infected with the disease, just as in the fourteenth century. Gather your fleas from any animals or places where fleas are abundant. You need a lot because the fleas do die from the disease when it clogs their passageway to their stomach so they do not get food. Be careful not to let the fleas get to you. Put them in jars. Your fleas will later spread your disease by biting infected rodents and then biting other rodents or humans.

6. Phase 4: Rodents Phase four is all about the rodents-rats, mice, or any rodents will do. To gather more rodents, take a trip to the sewer. These rodents will need to be infected by the bacteria, which can be accomplished by using the fleas and infected rodents that you gathered in phases 2 and 3. After these rodents are infected, have all of your fleas bite them. They will now contain the bacteria, and when the fleas bite another victim, this will spread the disease. The rodents that you use will play a bigger role than the fleas because they will live longer, be able to travel faster, and carry the fleas to different places. Do not go back in time and release the disease yet. We will save that for later when everything is planned out.

7. Phase 5: Spreading Over Water Later, when you choose your starting place for your disease, you will have to make sure this area has trading ports where ships are used to export goods to other countries. This is very important because you want your disease to spread to other continents. For instance, back when the Black Death occurred in the fourteenth century, the rats, fleas, and other rodents or hosts occasionally boarded ships that were used to trade with North America. This, in turn, spread the disease throughout more of the world and claimed more victims. You have to make sure that the place where you start your infection will have the same outcome.

8. Phase 6:The Victims By far, this is the easiest step. All you have to do is know what people or societies you want to infect. The world is just full of people, so it should be no problem trying to find people to contaminate. It’s your choice! No matter who you choose to infect, it will end up affecting people around the world. Just like when the Black Death happened before, this will be a world-wide pandemic. Although, some people with cats will have better odds. Seeing as most cats chase rodents away, their owners have better chances of not being infected.

9. Phase 7:Location, Location, Location Now it’s time to choose your starting location. You can start your bubonic plague in central Asia, just as the first Black Death, or you can choose any country in the world that you feel would be deserving. It might just depend on your mood which country you choose. If you’re feeling happy, choose a country with a funny name. If you are angry, choose a country you despise. Just make sure you look at the surrounding countries too because it will spread to them and then onto the whole of that continent, like it did in Asia. Even though it will spread to other continents, it will affect the original continent the worst, so choose wisely. For example, Europe and Asia suffered the greatest impact from the bubonic plague, losing over seventy five million people.

10. Phase 8: Staying Disease Free In our modern day society, we have a cure for the bubonic plague, so it is not much of a threat. But, if you were to go back in time to create the disease all over again, there is a high possibility that you will in turn be affected. So, before you go back in time, pack some antibiotics and some items that will help you stay sanitary, like hand sanitizer. These will help you avoid the symptoms of the Black Death. Be careful! You can get the disease from more than just fleas or rodents. For instance, if you were to touch an item that has the bacteria, it can spread through an open cut and give you the disease. The symptoms include coughing, fever, vomiting, muscular pain, mental disorganization, and delirium. The victims of this disease also experience buboes, which are horribly painful, and engorged lymph nodes that fill up with pus. Also, back in the 1300s, during the time of the plague, 60-90% of infected people died in just a few days when untreated. Most weren’t treated because the doctors didn’t really know of any treatments. These obviously are symptoms you would not want to suffer from.

11. Phase 9: Uneducated Doctors For the ninth phase, you will need to make sure the doctors in the place and time in which you choose to start your bubonic plague are uneducated. In the time of the first bubonic plague, the doctors did not know how the disease spread, what caused it, or how to cure it. This factor is important because you don’t want a doctor who knows what he is doing. If there is one, then that doctor might create a cure. The doctors who are uneducated are the ones you want. In Europe, during the period of the first Black Death, the doctors were uneducated. These doctors wore long robes and masks that looked like a bird’s beak. The beak was used to contain sweet smelling flowers. The doctors back then thought that the disease spread through the air, so they filled the beaks with flowers to block the disease from traveling. This belief was false, of course, and the flowers didn’t help at all. The long robes actually helped them even though they did not know it. They protected the doctors from the fleas and rodents spreading the disease to them. These doctors attempted to cure people, but did not prevail. They used strange techniques. For example, they tried putting hot onions on the buboes, letting pigeons suck the blood out of the buboes, and even blood ledding, a technique that involved the patient losing blood so that the disease would be lost with the blood. Most of the techniques did not work, but some slowed down the journey to death. Some techniques however, may have brought patients closer to death.

12. Phase 10: Time to Spread and Conserve The last phase is critical to having a successful epidemic. All you have to do is ration your supplies when you spread the disease. You want to save some of your materials and remember your information for later so that you can cause some smaller outbreaks. By the way, you have to choose places for your smaller outbreaks too. In the place where you begin your outbreak, you should use only about five- eighths of your materials so you are able to cause smaller outbreaks later. These smaller outbreaks will go on for decades if you ration wisely. In the time period of the first Black Death, around the mid 1300s, smaller outbreaks occurred after the original devastation. Some of these smaller outbreaks occurred in the United States, England, and many other places, but they were not as devastating as the large scale outbreaks. Most of these smaller outbreaks just stayed in the local area because people started to build up an immunity to the disease. You want to make sure that you can cause smaller outbreaks to continue the devastation for years to come. Now is the time to go back to the past to your chosen destination and let your rodents and fleas begin to spread your disease, staying at a safe distance of course. All you have to do is get comfortable and watch the action. Good luck!

13. Sources InformationOther (Pictures) –go.grolier.com gospelgifs.com –www.worldbookonline.com townschool.comwww.worldbookonline.com –www. Scribd.com sciencephoto.com http://www.insecta-inspecta.com/fleas/bdeath/ history.com (both pics. and info) http://www.medicinenet.com/plague/article.htm http://www.insecta-inspecta.com/fleas/bdeath/ jonmell.co.uk mapsofworld.com squidoo.com solarnavigator.net pets.webmd.com dreamscapegracy.wordpress.com http://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/museum/exhibit99/a_2.html medievaleurope.mrdonn.org