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This episode contains discussions of death by contagious disease.

I want to emphasize that the plague is very treatable today with antibiotics, so there's no need to panic over this disease.

After this advice, if contagious disease is still something you don't want to hear about, this may be a good episode to skip. Humans are fascinated by gore and violence, but even more so the mysterious and unsolved.

Interest in these disturbing and unpleasant subjects is called morbid curiosity, and it has gripped hundreds of people throughout the ages.

I am one of those people.

My name is Halley, and this is the Morbid Curiosity podcast.

... In part of the episode,

In part one of this episode, we discussed the cause of the plague, the bacterium Yersinia pestis,

which is a zoonotic disease of rodents. The bacteria are transmitted by fleas to rodents,

but when rodents move into close quarters with humans due to a shift in their habitat or environment,

the fleas can jump to humans, especially if the rodent population dies off because of the infection.

In humans, the bacteria can cause four different forms of the plague, bubonic, pneumonic,

septic, and abortive. The bubonic and pneumonic plague are the

most common. Symptoms include high fever, headaches, joint pain, vomiting, dizziness, and bubos,

or pus-filled sores on the lymph nodes nearest the flea bite. Neumonic plague occurs when the

bacteria infect the lungs,

and in this form, the plague can be passed from person to person through coughing and sneezing.

Septicemic plague occurs when the bacteria move from the lymph nodes into the bloodstream

...