I just realised what's missing....

[cephyn]

Originally posted by ainwood


A bit late on the reply.....

My source was from a recent article in New Scientist (sometime in november or december 2000). Tried to give you a hyperlink to it, but you need to be a subscriber.

The arguement went something along the lines of the proportion of the population that was infected, the mortality rate of those infected, the incubation period vs the transmission rate etc etc. Can't remember the exact details, but one thing they cited was that recent (20th century) outbreaks in India took months just to travel across one village.

Yeah, actually i did read that article -- it covered most of the same points as the articles in the popular media (CNN, BBC, ABC news, stuff like that)

They simply never addressed that the Black Death was a highly virulent strain, the complete lack of resistance of the local populace to the strain, the general lowering of immune systems following famine, or the factors of non-quarantining (in fact, the exact opposite, people fleeing the towns, not knowing they were infected) and the extreme extreme almost impossibility of a tropical disease like ebola surviving and spreading through Europe like wildfire in the years following the Little Ice Age.

Those factors taken into account, I just can't give credence to an ebola theory. its just half-thought through at best. Very very few historians and disease experts think hte ebola theory holds much water. It's just too improbable.

For an example of what happens when there is lowered resistance among the populace due to hard times combined with a severely mutated strain of sickness, read up on the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-1919. That one killed around 30 million people worldwide -- and it was less than 100 years ago.

So how do i view this in Civ? well, especially considering the Black Death, the rate of tech advancement in Civ is usually pretty steady. The Black Death caused a huge shift in the social makeup of Europe, allowing the Renaissance to really get moving. Civ simply doesn't model continent or worldwide plagues -- something that, historically, is not all that uncommon. I'd like to see Civ somehow model it, but i accept thats a pretty tough thing to do -- but it sure would be interesting, having your whole continent, your civ and anyone sharing it with you, lose about 1/4 or 1/3 of your population in 3 turns.