Bubonic Plague Essays - Plague, Bubonic Plague, Yersinia Pestis

Bubonic Plague Essays - Plague, Bubonic Plague, Yersinia Pestis Bubonic Plague The Bubonic Plague has killed more people than any other plague. During the 1300s, the Black Death, as they called it, killed nearly half the population of Europe. They called it the Black Death because of the dark color the peoples faces would turn after they died. It is caused by rod-shaped bacteria, Yersinia Pestis. The Bubonic Plague is an acute and severe infection. It is carried by the fleas on infected rodents(rat, squirrel). If the rodent or flea bites a person then it can be passed from person to person from mucus droplets spread by coughing. When infected, the person becomes ill in a few hours to a few days. The bacteria spread throughout the body. The symptoms include swollen lymph nodes(buboes), damaged capillaries signified by bleeding under the skin and black splotches, high fever, aching limbs, vomiting blood, shivering and extreme pain, and swelling continues in lymph nodes on groins, armpits, and neck until they burst shortly before death. Other forms of the plague are pneumonic, which causes severe pneumonia and septicemia. All forms of the plague are extremely dangerous and contagious. (2) The plague has been known for at least three-thousand years. Epidemics have been recorded in China since 224bc. The disease occurred in huge pandemics that destroyed the entire populations of cities throughout the Middle Ages; they have occurred sporadically since that time. The last great pandemic began in China in 1894 and spread to Africa, the Pacific islands, Australia, and the Americas, reaching San Francisco in 1900. Plague still occurs in Asia, Africa, South America, and Australia, but rarely appears in the U.S. Two small, well-contained outbreaks occurred in India in 1994. In 1950 the World Health Organization initiated sanitation programs for plague control throughout the world. (1) Many preventive measures, such as sanitation, killing of rats, and prevention of the transport of rats in ships arriving from ports in which the disease is endemic, are effective in reducing the incidence of plague. Famine, which reduces resistance to the disease, results in spread of plague. Individuals who have contracted the disease are isolated, put to bed, and fed fluids and easily digestible foods. Sedatives are used to reduce pain and to quiet delirium. During World War II, scientists using sulfa drugs were able to produce cures of plague; subsequently, streptomycin and tetracycline were found to be more effective in controlling the disease. (3)

Megalopolis From Boston to Washington

Megalopolis From Boston to Washington French geographer Jean Gottmann (1915-1994) studied the northeastern United States during the 1950s and published a book in 1961 that described the region as a vast metropolitan area over 500 miles long stretching from Boston in the north to Washington, D.C. in the south. This area (and the title of Gottmanns book) is Megalopolis. The term Megalopolis is derived from Greek and means very large city. A group of Ancient Greeks actually planned to construct a huge city on the Peloponnese Peninsula. Their plan didnt work out but the small city of Megalopolis was constructed and exists to this day. BosWash Gottmanns Megalopolis (sometimes referred to as BosWash for the northern and southern tips of the area) is a very large functional urban region that provides the whole of America with so many essential services, of the sort a community used to obtain in its downtown section, that it may well deserve the nickname of Main Street of the nation. (Gottmann, 8) The Megalopolitan area of BosWash is a governmental center, banking center, media center, academic center, and until recently, the biggest immigration center (a position usurped by Los Angeles in recent years). Acknowledging that while, a good deal of the land in the twilight areas between the cities remains green, either still farmed or wooded, matters little to the continuity of Megalopolis, (Gottmann, 42) Gottmann expressed that it was the economic activity and the transportation, commuting, and communication linkages within Megalopolis that mattered most. Megalopolis has actually been developing over hundreds of years. It initially began as the colonial settlements on the Atlantic seaboard coalesced into villages, cities, and urban areas. Communication between Boston and Washington and the cities in between has always been extensive and transportation routes within Megalopolis are dense and have been in existence for several centuries. Census Data When Gottmann researched Megalopolis in the 1950s, he utilized U.S. Census data from the 1950 Census. The 1950 Census defined many Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) in Megalopolis and, in fact, MSAs formed an unbroken entity from southern New Hampshire to northern Virginia. Since the 1950 Census, the Census Bureaus designation of individual counties as metropolitan has expanded as has the population of the region. In 1950, Megalopolis had a population of 32 million, today the metropolitan area includes more than 44 million people, approximately 16% of the entire U.S. population. Four of the seven largest CMSAs (Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Areas) in the U.S. are part of Megalopolis and are responsible for over 38 million of Megalopolis population (the four are New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, Washington-Baltimore, Philadelphia-Wilmington-Atlantic City, and Boston-Worcester-Lawrence). Gottmann was optimistic about the fate of Megalopolis and felt that it could work well, not only as a vast urban area but also as the distinct cities and communities that were parts of the whole. Gottmann recommended that We must abandon the idea of the city as a tightly settled and organized unit in which people, activities, and riches are crowded into a very small area clearly separated from its nonurban surroundings. Every city in this region spreads out far and wide around its original nucleus; it grows amidst an irregularly colloidal mixture of rural and suburban landscapes; it melts on broad fronts with other mixtures, of somewhat similar though different texture, belonging to the suburban neighborhoods of other cities. (Gottmann, 5) And There's More! Furthermore, Gottmann also introduced two developing Megalopoli in the United States - from Chicago and the Great Lakes to Pittsburgh and the Ohio River (ChiPitts) and the California coast from the San Francisco Bay area to San Diego (SanSan). Many urban geographers have studied the concept of Megalopolis in the United States and have applied it internationally. The Tokyo-Nagoya-Osaka Megalopolis in an excellent example of urban coalescence in Japan. The term Megalopolis has even come to define something much more broadly found than just the northeastern United States. The Oxford Dictionary of Geography defines the term as any many-centered, multi-city, urban area of more than 10 million inhabitants, generally dominated by low-density settlement and complex networks of economic specialization. Source: Gottmann, Jean. Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States. New York: The Twentieth Century Fund, 1961.