Another form of transportation for sickness was steamships. Bubonic plague was carried by “the steamship network that arose in the 1870’s was the vehicle that dispersed the infection around the globe, and did so, once the epidemic broke out in Canton and Hong Kong, with a speed that was limited only by the speed with which a ship could carry its colony of infected rats and fleas to a new port. Speed was obviously decisive in allowing a chain of infection to remain unbroken from port to port.” Often times over longer voyages, the plague could die out within the rats and fleas because the shipmen would become immune to the plague and there would be no persons left aboard that could be a sustainable host for the disease. The ocean was too wide for the plague to be carried from ports of the Mongol …show more content…
Plague was able to survive in its host from one port to another without dying off inside of its host because of larger transportation meant there more rats as well as other people to carry the disease. In 1900, the plague was able to survive on a steamship from China to San Francisco before it was quarantined and killed off. McNiell also explains how the silk road has a massive impact on the spread of the black death from China all the way to Europe and eventually onto merchant ships. Once on the merchant ships it dies off if people are immune or ends up killing all the hosts and ends there. “After the Black Death established itself in Central Asia at Lake Issyk-Kul, it began to spread into the Middle East, Northern Africa, and Europe by way of the Silk Road. During the 14th century, the Silk Road was controlled by the Mongols and was heavily used by both their warriors and by trading caravans. The host organisms for the Black Death, rats, were attracted to human garbage disposed by the caravans along the Silk Road. The Mongols were pastoralists who