The Plague of Athens

In the last unit for the disease course, it was titled World. For the last Action Project for the Disease course, we had to research a plague. I decided to do my project on The Plague of Athens. This plague was a version of Typhoid fever that attacked Athens in late 426 BC. It killed one their of the entire population due to the overcrowding of the city and living in close quarters with the animals. For this project I did a slide show and a script of this plague.

script:

In early 426 BC, a terrible plague broke out in Athens. This was happening during the Peloponnesian war which is what many people thought was the cause of this terrible disease that killed ⅓ of Athenians. They have now discovered by looking at the teeth of the remains of a little girl named myrtis, that the disease was Typhoid fever. Scientists are still trying to figure out the cause of this awful disease and how it only affected Athens rather than Sparta. The disease passed through Ethiopia, and across the med. sea and was said to be brought on by ships from Northern Africa docking in Athens. One of the more popular beliefs that the Athenians had about why the plagues were occurring was that god Apollo, the healer and protector from evil, sent the disease after being angered by Agamemnon. Agamemnon who was the king of Mycenae, (a mythological kingdom of ancient Greece) allegedly treating Apollo’s priest offensively. They tended to not try to rid themselves of the disease because they thought that when the gods were happy again, they would remove the disease, which never happened. When nothing got better, people turned on their religion and made up new colts and the people who stayed with tradition thought that the gods would get even more angry with them and continue to make the plague worse. A few of the more prominent symptoms from this plague included pus secreting rashes, high fever, and diarrhea. Plague victims often died after a week from internal burning. If they survived, the sickness moved to their stomach, giving them severe diarrhea; at this point, weakness often killed them. Many who survived past the weakness and diarrhea lost their fingers, toes, genitals, and sometimes even eyes. Total loss of memory also was a common symptom of survivors. It was not uncommon for Athenians to commit suicide after finding out they had contracted the plague. This is because the number of survivors was so low and death from the plague was excruciatingly painful. The one thing they did do though was blockade themselves by burning countryside surrounding Athens. While this strategy seemed to work initially, a few centuries later Rome contracted what is believed to be the same plague that struck Athens. The mortality rate when the first outbreak happened was 33% and in the second outbreak, it went down to 26%. This disease also affected dogs and birds which was a problem because they lived in very close quarters with all of their animals. This disease then moved on to other places but Athens was the most affected area.






www.bit.ly/1ChHbwp

This link will lead to a graph that was simulated to show how Athens might have looked based on an epidemic and life expectancy in years. Since Athens is not on Gapminder, the way the countries move should show how they might look.