From bubonic plague in the middle ages to bird flu or Sars in the 21st century, infectious diseases have spread horrifyingly fast in cities, where people live in close proximity and sometimes crowded together.
He reckons that an outbreak of bubonic plague in Amsterdam made people less risk-averse.
In Cape Town, a new effort to divide, aimed at keeping Europeans healthy, began after the arrival of bubonic plague at the start of the 20th century.
Liverpool's terraces may be historically significant, but so is bubonic plague.
AIDS is not like the bubonic plague: it strikes mostly those of bread-winning age, and it kills them slowly.
But its dinner (and lunch and breakfast) has been disappearing rapidly, killed by ranchers and a form of bubonic plague that also affects the ferrets.
Many of the places he visited had been touched by the bubonic plague that swept Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries, and he was fascinated by the legend of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
Some 10% of Europeans have a mutant gene, CCR5, that protects them against HIV infection.Prevailing theory suggests that this mutation was perpetuated by the selective pressure of another disease, the bubonic plague.
Whether the outbreak is of seasonal influenza, Ebola fever or bubonic plague, Ro tells you, for each person infected, how many others are likely to be infected later.
Apparently, the mainland was even responsible for the bubonic plague in 14th-century Europe, which spread west from unburied corpses after an earthquake in southern China.
This disease, spread like bubonic plague by fleas on rats that have escaped from ships, has come east from California into Texas and has slowly been working its way north up the Rocky Mountains.
