Alby_da_Wolf said:
You should consider that of all the great epidemic diseases of the past, only smallpox has been completely eradicated, the others, including the plague, started being kept under control, with foci spreading less and less, first with better urban and personal hygiene, then, later, with scientific progress (greatest progress came not only from improvements of medicine, but also from widespread replacement of open sewers with buried ones, that weren't a novelty, ancient Romans and other ancient civilisations built them, but in the Middle Ages there had been a regression in hygiene in most parts of Europe, but also Marseille soap and the adoption of cotton, allowing to wash clothes more frequently, helped a lot, like other forms of prevention). |
Yeah Plague is one of those diseases that's always going to be around; it's not really viable to eradicate it as it has such a huge host population of animals to hide in.
What makes stuff like Smallpox and Polio vulnerable to extermination is that they can only viably reproduce through infecting people, so if you vaccinate all their potential human hosts, the disease has nowhere to go and dies out.
Last edited by curl-6 - on 09 May 2019