• Question: Hello scientists! I have come to ask about The Great Plague. My question is "Was there a cure for The Great PLague back in 1888 in london?"

    Asked by to Dre, Charli, Heather, Oliver, Becky on 20 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Rebecca Williams

      Rebecca Williams answered on 20 Jun 2014:


      Hi sirnyancat22,
      What a difficult question! I learnt about the plague when I was at school – probably about your age, and haven’t really learnt much about it since. I remember learning about the Black Death and rats. So, I went and looked some information up for you.

      For 400 years, between 1347 and 1750, Britain kept suffering from lots of different plagues. There were two big ones that are famous. There was the Black Death which happened between 1346–53. This killed between 75 to 200 million people around the world! Wow! Then there was the Great Plague in 1665-66. This was the Great Plague of London and that killed 100,000 people, about 15% of London’s population.

      You can treat the plague with antibiotics. Antibiotics are substances that stop the growth of microorganism – sickly bugs to you and me. They were only discovered for the first time in 1877 and first called antibiotic drugs in 1942. So, no, I don’t think there was treatment for the Plague in 1888.

      The plague still hasn’t gone away! You can stil catch it, but it is very very very very VERY rare.

    • Photo: Heather Price

      Heather Price answered on 20 Jun 2014:


      Hi Sirnyancat22,

      Like Rebecca says, the antibiotic was invented a bit later than the time when the plague was at it’s worst, but people had their own ideas for how to avoid catching the plague. Some people thought that if you smoked a lot of tobacco that you wouldn’t get the plague (don’t try this at home!) Other people would wear lucky charms that they thought would scare away the plague. When people bought things at the market, instead of handing over their money to the shop keeper, they would put the coins in vinegar which they thought would kill any germs.

      So people had lots of different ideas at the time on what to do to stop the plague from spreading. We’re really lucky today that we have so many medicines to treat diseases – I wouldn’t want to rely on lucky charms!

    • Photo: Charlotte Flavell

      Charlotte Flavell answered on 20 Jun 2014:


      The Great Plague in London was caused by a germ that lived in rats, and more importantly, in the fleas that live on rats. Fleas and rats were a big problem in the olden days as they weren’t anywhere as clean as we are now. Sharing your bed with a few fleas was probably quite common.

      We still have cases of the plague every so often, around 7 cases per year in the USA. These are usually caused by being bitten by a flea which has already bitten an infected animal.
      One case involved a 7 year old girl who found a dead squirrel while camping. She got bitten by an infected flea and had to go to hospital, Becky is absolutely right though, she was OK in the end because we gave her antibiotics to kill the plague germs.

      In terms of treatment, I think the Great Plague that you are talking about might actually have been around 1666, which would put it way before the discovery of antibiotics.

      A lot of people think that the outbreak of the Great Fire of London put an end to the plague, but it may have been disappearing on it’s own already. It is thought that as many as 7000 people a week died at the worst point of the plague, so it is possible that it had already killed everyone who could catch it already.

    • Photo: Oliver George

      Oliver George answered on 20 Jun 2014:


      The others have already said a fair bit about what caused the plague and how we can treat it so I’ll talk a little bit about how the plague could come back!

      The antibiotics we use against the microbe are slowly becoming less effective as the microbe is evolving resistance! This is similar to another microbe known as MRSA which you may have heard of. This is a really serious problem as more and more microbes are becoming resistant to antibiotics! Some scientists are worried that we might stop being able to treat infections with antibiotics but I’m more optimistic. There are all kinds of alternative treatments being developed to help cure diseases caused by microbes.

      The plague is actually more common than you might think. While there are only a couple of cases a year in the USA people get infected far more frequently in places like India. The main way people get infected is through contact with wild animals which carry the microbe. This means we might never be able to get rid of the plague like we got rid of smallpox!

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