While Madagascar experiences cases of plague every year, this particular epidemic is different because it has started much earlier than usual and is spreading faster than normally expected.
The surging number of cases has drawn comparisons with the 14th century Black Death, one of the worst pandemics in human history which is widely believed to have caused the world population to shrink from an estimated 450 million down to 350–375 million in the 14th century.
Dr Tim Jagatic, a Medicins Sans Frontieres (Doctors without Borders) doctor currently working in Madagascar, revealed why the two epidemics are being compared.
He told Express.co.uk: “There’s a historical stigmatisation – people still use the term ‘Black Death’ which is a term which is associated with the outbreak in the thirteenth century in Europe when 50 million people died.
“According to the records we’ve seen, it seems as though that name was associated with the disease because a lot of people, in this pre-antibiotic era, were falling into the septic form of the disease.
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“That septic form, as we now know, caused a loss of circulation in the fingertips and when you have a loss of circulation in the fingers they turn black.
“This disease bore a strong association with sepsis, so every time somebody developed black fingers people expected them to die within the next day or so.”
Most of the cases reported in this year’s outbreak in Madagascar are the pneumonic form of the plague, which can be traced easily with antibiotics.
Dr Jagatic emphasised that the Black Death pandemic occurred long before any antibiotics were available, and modern medicine means outbreaks are far less likely to have such a devastating effect.
Despite this, cases of the deadly plague have been spreading rapidly across Madagascar and have soared by 37 per cent in just five days, official figures show.
Professor Jimmy Whitworth, an international public health scientist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, told the Mail this particular outbreak was the “worst for 50 years”.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) now says there are 1,801 suspected cases – significantly higher than the 1,309 it reported just a week ago.