The Black Death

The Black Death was a plague pandemic that occurred in Europe from 1346 to 1353. It was one of the most fatal pandemics in human history; as many as 50 million people died, perhaps 50% of Europe's 14th-century population.

And then European colonization of the world begins in the 1400s. Coincidentally.

I'm not a big believer in wild coincidence.

In any event like that, typically poor people take it the hardest. I'm going to take a wild ass guess here that the Black Death left Europe with a top heavy society of landed nobles with management skills and too few peasants and they went looking elsewhere for labor.

And were assholes about it. 

I recently tripped across a video titled The Black Plague never made sense until now. And it says that various types of records suggest there must have been an undocumented volcanic event or multiple events that caused cooling for a few years which helped foster crop failure and this led to demand for imported grains to stave off starvation and thus trade is what brought disease to already weakened populations suffering from being underfed.

Volcanic eruptions having broad impact on climate is a mini version of our current climate change drama. Climate drama fosters disease, sometimes on a very large scale.

I'm an environmental studies major with a serious incurable medical condition. This combination makes me keenly aware of this intersection between environmental stuff and societal stuff and public health, such as pandemics like the one US modern fools suffered recently called COVID because we just adamantly refuse to learn from past mistakes.

We have a global economy. This has its good points, like scurvy is now a disease of marginalized people:

It takes at least a month of little to no vitamin C in the diet before symptoms occur. In modern times, scurvy occurs most commonly in neglected children, people with mental disorders, unusual eating habits, alcoholism, and older people who live alone.

And it has its bad points, including routine widespread travel helps spread infectious disease. This includes the recent global pandemic called COVID.

Ebola, HIV (AKA AIDS) and some other scary diseases come out of Africa which peasantless European landed nobles apparently decided was their new work force in their post pandemic new normal. Those diseases come out of Africa in part because it continues to lack adequate basic infrastructure, like water infrastructure, that would support adequate hygiene for everyone, no matter how poor.

Elephantiasis is an African disease and it is directly caused by lack of adequate infrastructure. You get a parasitic infection of the lymphatic system and lack of daily washing leads to secondary infection and this causes extreme, debilitating swelling.

Lymphedema management programs all included a hygiene element, usually in the form of education about the importance of daily washing the affected limbs with soap and water.

That link also says:

The current study underscores the crucial importance of WASH—particularly hygiene—in the secondary prevention of morbidity and disability for LF-related lymphedema. The basic hygiene-based interventions recommended for management of lymphedema are also effective for leprosy, Buruli ulcer, and diabetic foot, as well as other chronic conditions of the lower limbs [6, 56]. Further, essentially the same hygiene-based measures are recommended for persons with podoconiosis [57]. Thus, integrated hygiene-based interventions are increasingly recognized as critical for the management of a wide range of lower limb conditions, several of which are diseases of neglected populations, associated with poverty, and targeted for elimination as public health problems. 

In short, lots of people on planet Earth lack the means to wash with soap and water daily and in a (sarcasm) shocking plot twist no one could predict (/sarcasm), this directly causes significant widespread debilitating health issues.

And then in another shocking plot twist no one could possibly predict, well-heeled people, often Westerners visiting for some reason, bring home diseases from these places, including some absolute jackass of a gay airline pilot whom Sixty Minutes said was the source of the first fifty cases of HIV in the US because he was going to have himself a good time before he died and felt no obligation whatsoever to protect the health and welfare of his many casual hookups.

And THAT is why AIDS became known as "a gay disease" in the US and NOT "because God frowns upon thee for being perverts."

Anyway, I write Eclogiselle because it seems clear to me that we know how to provide adequate basic water infrastructure and local food security etc. affordably to everyone everywhere on planet Earth. We are just collectively stupid assholes who don't want to and who want to pretend we don't know how.

As if we don't know that Americans had daily milk delivery before we had refrigerators in most homes and we don't know how to establish adequate water off grid or homes that will keep you from dying in the cold without electricity or similar heat sources. Like we collectively have no idea whatsoever that America passed the Rural Electricification Act less than a hundred years ago.

This is not ancient history that our most modern countries had lots of people living without electricity and they were productive citizens with good lives, not total fucking losers with ZERO hope of getting an education, establishing a middle class lifestyle etc.

Hypothetically, you disseminate information for FREE and help the poorest places establish baseline adequate hygiene and food security and then you stop the next plague at its source before anyone knows anything could have happened because the latest normal, routine genetic twist for some ordinary germ doesn't become a treatment resistant super bug spread around the globe in 24 hours by excess global travel that is frequently frivolous and non essential.

But no one wants solutions. This won't stop the next plague and if it did, you can bet piles of money people would act like it's wild coincidence and there's no cause and effect relationship here between improved hygiene and fewer dramatic widespread public health crises.

And it's not paying MY bills and I don't even want to try to explain how very basic water infrastructure not only should improve public health GLOBALLY -- including for over privileged first world MORONS and jackasses who don't care about quality of life for poor people in Africa "because not MY problem" and LA LA LA NOT LISTENING, never heard of HIV and how we exported it from Africa -- but should also walk back human caused climate change rooted in the destruction of 85 percent of global wetlands during the exact same period we are blaming EVERYTHING on The Industrial Revolution and hand waving off solutions because we desperately NEED CARS goddamnit. 

But apparently don't need nor want frivolous bullshit like clean air and clean water and fewer drug resistant super bugs based on how we are voting with our wallets.

So I'm trying desperately to wrap up this completely POINTLESS hobby, finish the archives of a few projects and move on to something that might have some hope of paying MY bills. Because that's all that really matters in this brain damaged world.