treets. These unsanitary streets were breeding grounds for rats. The black rats loved the filth and warmth they loved the narrow streets with the houses crammed together, they feasted on the rubbish, thrown out of windows. Everyone was crowded together. Families slept in one room often sharing beds and sometimes there were no beds and a dozen people could be found asleep on a straw covered mud floor. Animals sometimes slept in with them too.
             The earliest known visitation of the plague to Europe occurred in Athens in 430 B.C. A disastrous epidemic occurred in the Mediterranean during the time of the Roman emperor Justinian; an estimated 25% to 50% of the population is reported to have succumbed (died). The most widespread epidemic began in Constantinople in 1334; spread throughout Europe (returning Crusaders were a factor), and in less than 20 years is estimated to have killed three quarters of the population of Europe and Asia. The great plague of London in 1665 is recorded in many works of literature. Quarantine measures helped contain the disease, but serious epidemics continued to occur even in the 19th cent. The disease is still prevalent in parts of Asia. Also In Surat, India, in 1994.
             The bubonic plague is a disease that's caused a bacterium that is transmitted to people by fleas from rats, called Yersinia pestis, discovered independently by Shibasaburo Kitasato and Alexandre Yersin in 1894. Bubonic plague should be suspected when a person develops a swollen gland, fever, chills, headache, and extreme exhaustion, and has a history of possible exposure to infected rodents, rabbits, or fleas. Also an inflamed, tende
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