After meeting medical entomologists during his time serving in the United States Air Force, Thor Freeman, now a sophomore at the University of Delaware, became very aware of the risks that pests have ...

Under the microscope, Yersinia pestis doesn't look particularly special. It's a fairly standard shape for a bacterium – a sort of short, round-ended rod – and relatively immobile.

Caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, the bubonic plague pandemic swept through North Africa, Europe, and Asia nearly 700 years ago, wiping out up to 30-60% of the population.

So, it was only this quirk of flea anatomy that really prevented millions of deaths in the U.S. ♪ ♪ NARRATOR: February 1908 saw the last diagnosed case of bubonic plague.

The bubonic plague in particular, San Francisco’s Citizens’ Health Committee noted several years later, was considered “an Oriental disease, peculiar to rice-eaters.” “The Chinese cancer ...

In fact, the bubonic plague was not transmitted by odors but rather, it would be discovered in the late 19th century, by a bacterium carried by fleas that had bitten infected rats.

Of all the epidemics and pandemics that have ravaged humankind throughout history, the most devastating for Europe was the bubonic plague, also known as the Black Death, which swept away about a ...

In 1894, the Pasteur Institute sent bacteriologist Yersin to Hong Kong to investigate an epidemic of bubonic plague. The disease had already killed more than 40,000 people as it swept through ...

Researchers excavated 2,000-year-old feces from a latrine along the Silk Road in northwestern China, and found that it contained eggs from the Chinese liver fluke, a parasitic worm that is ...

Carried by rodents and spread by fleas, the bubonic plague killed a third of Europeans in the mid-14th century. Today, it is still active in Africa, Asia and the Americas, with as many as 2,000 ...