The Judas Strain

The pestilence came first to the town of Kaffa on the Black Sea. There the mighty Mongolian Tartars waged siege upon the Italian Genoese, merchants and traders. Plague struck the Mongol armies with burning boils and bloody expulsions. Struck with great malice, the Mongol lords used their siege catapults to cast their diseased dead over the Genoese walls, and spread plague in a litter of bodies and ruin. In the year of the incarnation of the Son of God 1347, the Genoese fled under sail in twelve galleys back to Italy, to the port of Messina, bringing the Black Death to our shores.

— DUKE M. GIOVANNI (1356), trans. by Reinhold Sebastien in Il Apocalypse (Milan: A. Mondadori, 1924), 34–35

Why the bubonic plague suddenly arose out of China’s Gobi desert during the Middle Ages and slew a third of the world’s population remains unknown. In fact, no one knows why so many plagues and influenzas of the last century — SARS, the Avian Flu — have arisen out of Asia. But what is known with fair certainty: the next great pandemic will arise again out of the East.

— United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Compendium of Infectious Diseases, May 2006