Blog Session 6

The article I chose to make a summary of, was taken from the following link:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/10/bubonic-plague-outbreak-madagascar-rats-jails, which you can find in theguardian.com/uk, it´s called "Bubonic plague outbreak feared in Madagascar".

Bubonic disease affects a lot of countries in the world, like Perú or the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but  nowadays Madagascar is  the most affected country of the world. Last year 256 people became the disease and 60 of them died. The worst thing is that, as experts say, there is a high probability that the disease becomes a plague if the right measures are not taken. What they principally recommend is that the rat infested prisons in Madagascar are cleaned up, because rodents transmit diseases. It is difficult to make that, because the environment of prisons, over all the fact that in Madagascar (as here in Chile) they´re  overcrowded and unhygienic, contributes to the rat problem. The way that rodents transmit the bacillus to humans is through fleas.

The problem becomes worse with humidity and high temperatures, because it attracts those insects.  If they want to prevent a plague outbreak, measures must be taken soon, because October is the most humid and warm mouth in Madagascar. If jails are infested, the disease would spread in a very short time to the rest of the population of Madagascar, So to prevent spread of 'black death', authorities and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) have launch campaign to clean up rat-infested jails.