The medieval Black Death (c. 1347-1351) was one of the most devastating epidemics in human history. It killed tens of millions of Europeans, and recent analyses have shown that the disease targeted elderly adults and individuals who had been previously exposed to physiological stressors. Following the epidemic, there were improvements in standards of living, particularly in dietary quality for all socioeconomic strata.

At least 20 people in one village in Madagascar have died in an outbreak of the bubonic plague.

Madagascar faces a bubonic plague epidemic unless it slows the spread of the disease, experts have warned.

With 57 cases in a decade, it is far below the hardest-hit countries, Congo with 10,581 and Madagascar with 7,182.

One person in Southwest China's Sichuan province died of plague on Sept 7, the Ministry of Health said Monday.

The government is planning to make cancer a “notifiable disease”, which will mean every case will have to be reported. Till now infectious diseases like polio, plague, H1N1, H5N1 (bird flu) figure in the list of notifiable diseases. Recently, tuberculosis was made a notifiable disease. Cancer would become the first non-communicable disease to be included in the same category.

Officials in the Union health ministry disclosed that government is seriously considering to make cancer a notifiable disease and the decision in this regard will be taken very soon.

The Amur tiger has an extremely small population in the Russian Far East. However due to conservation efforts, that population has remained stable at around 350 individuals living in the wild.

Plague in Brazil is poorly known and now rarely seen, so studies of its ecology are difficult. We used ecological niche models of historical (1966-present) records of human plague cases across northeastern Brazil to assess hypotheses regarding environmental correlates of plague occurrences across the region.

Hardik Shah | TNN

Vapi: Goat plague has killed at least 400 goats and sheep in Vapi in the past 10 days.

World Health Organisation (WHO) warned Bangladesh and other South East Asian countries about the pneumonic plague that had recently hit China.

As it is a public health emergency of international concern and China is not far from Bangladesh, WHO warned Bangladesh to take cautionary steps to control the spread of pneumonic plague, said the government officials.

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