I was enjoy some CK2 when I had this idea.

We all know of the Bubonic Plague or Black Death in the 1300's that killed off about 1/3 to 1/2 of the European population.

How would something like that effect the world in say the 1920's? Unlikely I know but this just say it happened. What happens next.
 
As I understand it (I'm not an expert) the only effective treatment is antibiotics and the ones that have been found to be most effective are all 1940s or newer.

Better understanding of how diseases spread than our 17th Century forebears and early antibiotics hopefully mean that although it's going to be bad it's not going to be 'entire villages disappearing from the map' bad. According to Wiki the untreated death rate is somewhere between 30 and 90% while with effective treatment it's 10% (there's also still 650 cases a year reported!). Split the difference to take into account the less effective treatments available and you're probably talking 25%-ish death rate.

I'm guessing it's going to be at least as bad as Spanish Flu?
 
As I understand it (I'm not an expert) the only effective treatment is antibiotics and the ones that have been found to be most effective are all 1940s or newer.

Better understanding of how diseases spread than our 17th Century forebears and early antibiotics hopefully mean that although it's going to be bad it's not going to be 'entire villages disappearing from the map' bad. According to Wiki the untreated death rate is somewhere between 30 and 90% while with effective treatment it's 10% (there's also still 650 cases a year reported!). Split the difference to take into account the less effective treatments available and you're probably talking 25%-ish death rate.

I'm guessing it's going to be at least as bad as Spanish Flu?

Wasn't that going on at the same time as this supposed timeline. So not only would you have to deal with that killing people you now also have something like this entering into the world. Needless to say shit going to be bad for alot of people.
 
Spanish Flu was 1918, so shortly before. Depending when your outbreak is it might be coming into a world with a badly weakened population (hunger and disease from World War 1, Spanish Flu then Black Death all in quick succession is going to be very bad) but by the 1920s I'm assuming that people are probably mostly over the worst of the war years.
 
What if Bubonic Plague attacks during 1918 flu epidemic? Humans were already weakened by a war, hunger or Spanish influenza. If we add the Plague then mortality rates could skyrocket.
 
Spanish Flu was 1918, so shortly before. Depending when your outbreak is it might be coming into a world with a badly weakened population (hunger and disease from World War 1, Spanish Flu then Black Death all in quick succession is going to be very bad) but by the 1920s I'm assuming that people are probably mostly over the worst of the war years.

Oh I knew it was around the 1920's. At any rate having that and than one or two years later having something like the plague is going to see people die in mass. I'm not sure how many used planes to cross the oceans in the 1920's but I can't help but imagine it would be catastrophic.

Clearly a plague in the 20th would be far from it's 14th counterpart. But it's still going to be very bad. Maybe not nations falling bad but maybe stopping people at the border and setting up camps. Removing civil rights for a time to stop it from growing any bigger. Stopping all in coming flights and the closing of ports. Anything to lessen the loss of life.

I mean this is the Bubonic plague that's not a cold it's something far worse.
 
The incubation period for the Bubonic plague is 3 to 6 days. That's not enough for a Trans-Atlantic Voyage but more than enough of a good train trip.
The Plague appearing on a trans Atlantic ocean liner would have been horrific. In Steerage people were packed in as close as possible to maximize profits, if the plague shows up there they'd be sealed off and 80% could die before the liner reached its destination.
On the other hand steerage passengers were given a medical screening before boarding, to prevent such a thing. First and second class weren't. The plague could guess who made the first and second class sections of the ship as well as the crew. Leaving the engineering crew and steerage class untouched.
Railways would spread the Plague like wildfire across the developed world. Ironically the less developed areas wouldn't be hit as hard.
 
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I was enjoy some CK2 when I had this idea.

We all know of the Bubonic Plague or Black Death in the 1300's that killed off about 1/3 to 1/2 of the European population.

How would something like that effect the world in say the 1920's? Unlikely I know but this just say it happened. What happens next.
Devastating, as in fact they were. The Third Plague Pandemic started in China in 1855 and ended in 1960 (though infections were low well before that) and killed at least twenty million people worldwide.

Streptomycin and Chloramphenicol, the first drugs useful against y pestis weren't available in quantity until 1947 and 1950 respectively. Before that mortality was still high, especially for the pneumonic form (nearly 100%).

For example Canton suffered an outbreak of plague in March 1894 which killed over sixty thousand people in twenty days. Nearby Hong Kong soon had it's own cases and within a month another fifty thousand were dead. Then it spread to British India where the death toll over the next twenty years is estimated at twelve-and-a-half million.
BTW this outbreak lead to the first successful study of the disease, the isolation of the bacterium (by Alexandre Yersin) and Haffkine's vaccine (better than nothing but problematic).
The most useful measures against the spread of plague were quarantine, reasonable diet, sanitation and rodenticides.


Speculation.
The Indian outbreaks of 1896 onward were almost exclusively the bubonic form of plague, with very few pneumonic cases (unlike in China). If the disease had been mostly the pneumonic form it's likely that the fatalities would have been far, far higher.
 
By 1920 the bacteria that caused the plague was well known, as was the transmission cycle (rat/rodent-flea-person). The transmission of the pneumonic form was also well known, an epidemic usually started with the bubonic form and sometimes "became" pneumonic. In any case the reason plague outbreaks were where they were in "modern" times was that you didn't have the sorts of living conditions in most developed countries where folks were likely to get get fleas from rats, there was a much higher standard of hygiene and sanitation. In the trenches, conditions were a different story, in spite of the delousing procedures which were of limited effectiveness, though much better than in the past.

Between sanitation, rat control/flea control, some quarantining you won't see the plague spread anything like the flu. Using the procedures available at the time, flu was containable to some extent and they did not know what caused it (flu virus not identified). Plague outbreaks in India, China, and other spots where conditions were highly favorable to the transmission cycle could have been worse, massive involvement in Europe and North America, not really absent some improbable bacterial mutation.
 
Until the 20th century we had a few strong plague epidemics and so people were somehow prepared, many also developed imunity. For a "successful" plague epidemy with high mortality in the past century, I believe we would have to erase the Black Death and it's follow up minor outbursts, maybe even the earlierJustinian's Plague. But this will have huge butterflies, so we wouldn't recognize our actual history.
 
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I was enjoy some CK2 when I had this idea.

We all know of the Bubonic Plague or Black Death in the 1300's that killed off about 1/3 to 1/2 of the European population.

How would something like that effect the world in say the 1920's? Unlikely I know but this just say it happened. What happens next.

It was called the Spanish flu.
 
What if Bubonic Plague attacks during 1918 flu epidemic? Humans were already weakened by a war, hunger or Spanish influenza. If we add the Plague then mortality rates could skyrocket.
Hell, just replace Spanish Flu with the Bubonic Plague. People were already assuming it was plague, so not that large a jump....
 
Sigh - no can do (replace flu with y. pestis). Different mechanisms of transmission, preventing plague transmission much more doable with 1918 tech and knowledge than flu.
 

nbcman

Donor
Sigh - no can do (replace flu with y. pestis). Different mechanisms of transmission, preventing plague transmission much more doable with 1918 tech and knowledge than flu.
So much this. There’s a reason why the IJ Unit 731 used infected pests as their vector for many attacks over 20 years later instead of tinkering with infectious agents.
 
What was called the Spanish flu? The plague or the thing that happened around the 1920's? I'm not really sure what your saying with this reply.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu

The premise is a plaque which wipes out roughly half the population in Europe. Given the amount of casualties with knowledge of modern medicine like hygiene. Now imagine a Spanish flu without that knowledge. The body count could have been many times larger.

Sigh - no can do (replace flu with y. pestis). Different mechanisms of transmission, preventing plague transmission much more doable with 1918 tech and knowledge than flu.

Actually, with infrastructure destroyed in large parts of Europe and many refugees, it is not as farfetched as one might think.
 
I recently read an fiction series where the NDM-1 enzyme combined with the bubonic plague and resulted in a global pandemic. If this was to happen in real life how serious would it be?

"New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase 1 (NDM-1)[1] is an enzyme that makes bacteria resistant to a broad range of beta-lactam antibiotics. These include the antibiotics of the carbapenem family, which are a mainstay for the treatment of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections. The gene for NDM-1 is one member of a large gene family that encodes beta-lactamase enzymes called carbapenemases. Bacteria that produce carbapenemases are often referred to in the news media as "superbugs" because infections caused by them are difficult to treat. Such bacteria are usually susceptible only to polymyxins and tigecycline.[2]

NDM-1 was first detected in a Klebsiella pneumoniae isolate from a Swedish patient of Indian origin in 2008. It was later detected in bacteria in India, Pakistan, the United Kingdom, the United States,[3] Canada,[4] and Japan.[5]

The most common bacteria that make this enzyme are gram-negative such as Escherichia coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae, but the gene for NDM-1 can spread from one strain of bacteria to another by horizontal gene transfer.[6]"
 
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