Artifact 2: 

I believe that a few factors played into contributing to the epidemic. Rats were the host of flies and the rats lives among people witch easily transferred the plague. Once people were sick and sometimes had died from the plague their relatives would take their furs and blankets for themselves. People would also have the plague unknowingly and would travel to other places and spread it faster. Once the plague took over people were having a tough time trying to figure out the reasoning for why this epidemic was occurring. With most people being uneducated and no understanding of basic biology they decided to blame the Jews. Even though the Jews didn’t have nothing to do with it many of them suffered. Another belief of the epidemic was the God was punishing them for all their sins. People tried to use fire and smoke to prevent the plague from traveling as well as practicing religion. The overall effect of the epidemic was the it made people go crazy and think that it was the end of the world. Many people still thought that the Jews were behind it. 

Plagues still occur in the U.S. today like that. They can easily be transferred by sexual contact, coughing, and through air. For sex, condoms are the number one way to prevent anything being transferred to the other partner. In other ways of prevention, the COC, FDA, and the government should be up to date on what is being spread as well as how to treat it. With the plague the re-emerged in Madagascar was probably caused by the same problem. By being transferred from animal to person and then person to person. If the plague reached epidemic levels, then it probably took a period to recover from it. There had to be isolation involved to try and keep the infected people away from the healthy ones as well as trying to keep people from traveling to different places to try and detainee the plague.