by Joan Kleynhans

Created on: July 16, 2008

Fleas are intricate and adaptable bloodsucking parasites. They can survive for months without food and can stand tremendous pressure. They can leap 150 times their own length, equivalent to a man jumping nearly a thousand feet.

As carriers of plague they have claimed more human victims than all the wars ever fought on earth. Fleas evolved as highly specialized bloodsucking parasites at least 60 millions years ago.tangled in the host's fur. They can accelerate 50 times faster than the space shuttle - to 140G. Their ability to withstand enormous pesuure protects them against the scratching and biting of the flea-ridden hosts.

They can remain frozen for a year and then revive. Man is the only primate which has fleas.

Plague possibly originated among burrowing rodents of central Africa and central Asia. When plague infected a colony of rodents, it would rapidly reduce the numbers.This would allow rodents from neighbouring colonies to move in, pick up the infected fleas, and spread the disease.

Catastrophe followed when plague entered the human population. The first outbreak may have been the scourge that struck the Philistines in the 12 th century B.C. The Old Testament refers to "mice that mar the land."

Later the first of three plague pandemics struck in A.D. 541, swirling around the Mediterranean like a deadly storm for over two centuries. An estimated 40 million people were wiped out. At its peak the plague killed 10 000 people a day in Constantinople.

When lucrative trade routes opened across Asia in the 14th century, caravans and ships transporting silk and jewels also brought other stowaways. In October 1347 vessels arrived in Messina, Sicily with their crews dying from an mysterious disease. The shipboard rats were also ill. The devastation over the next five yeras became known as the Black death. By 1352 plague had killed 25 million people in Europe.

Most victims died within five days suffering fever and excruciating swellings in the armpits and groin - so-called buboes. When infection spread via the bloodstream to the lungs, death, in the form of pneumonic plague, came with swift certainty. To this day preumonic plague is the deadliest form of the disease.

The worst thing was the lack of explanation for the greatest natural disaster Europe had ever known. Looking for scapegoats, Europeans massacred Jews, who were suspected of poisoning the water. Neighbours turned on neighbours, parents turned on children. The sick were walled up in their houses and then quarantined

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