Another big daddy of a plague was the Black Death, a killer of millions of people, including, at one point, as much as half the world’s population in the fourteenth century. The Smithsonian magazine describes three different ways the plague attacks: through the skin, attacking lymph nodes (bubonic); through the blood; through the lungs. The deadly nature of the plague owed to several mutations in the bacteria that made it elusive to the immune system and easy to transfer. Our immune system, in the case of the lung version, was virtually helpless.
Black Death (14th Century) Bubonic one type
