How did the plague affect children?

Question

How did the plague affect children?

Answer 1

Children died in a higher proportion than healthy young adults so few were left orphaned.  Their immune systems were still developing so they were more vulnerable.  

Occasionally a family took extraordinary measures to ensure a child survived.  There was a note of one such from the 1670s.  The child was handed out through a window, stripped, clothed in new clothes, transported out of London, then stripped again at HER destination and bathed thoroughly.  There was no indication whether she survived or not, but the rest of the family of merchants died.  

Answer 2

it killed them

Answer 3

uhh I think they killed them.. just like other people.

I've never heard about children being immune...

Answer 4

children and the old have weak immune systems which can't deal with the bacteria as well as other age groups. has nothing to do with not being able to provide for themselves or any of that other c**p.

children aren't born with and don't inherit the mothers immune capabilities. therefore they must develop there own antibodies to fight infection, when they are young they will have weak immune responses to an antigen such as the yersinia pestis bacteria (the plauge)

id go into more detail but you just get bored :)

Answer 5

Via rats, Just as it did with Adults. Only the sickening proces went quicker.

Answer 6

Do you mean the pandemic of bubonic plague in Europe?

The Breakdown of Social Order

"One citizen avoided another, hardly any neighbour troubled about others, relatives never or hardly ever visited each other. Moreover, such terror was struck into the hearts of men and women by this calamity, that brother abandoned brother, and the uncle his nephew, and the sister her brother, and very often the wife her husband. What is even worse and nearly incredible is that fathers and mothers refused to see and tend their children, as if they had not been theirs.

Thus, a multitude of sick men and women were left without any care, except from the charity of friends (but these were few), or the greed, of servants, though not many of these could be had even for high wages, Moreover, most of them were coarse-minded men and women, who did little more than bring the sick what they asked for or watch over them when they were dying. And very often these servants lost their lives and their earnings. Since the sick were thus abandoned by neighbours, relatives and friends, while servants were scarce, a habit sprang up which had never been heard of before. Beautiful and noble women, when they fell sick, did not scruple to take a young or old man-servant, whoever he might be, and with no sort of shame, expose every part of their bodies to these men as if they had been women, for they were compelled by the necessity of their sickness to do so. This, perhaps, was a cause of looser morals in those women who survived."

Answer 7

I don't have any statistics, but I suspect that the plague killed a similar proportion of children as it did adults.  

Answer 8

  Partially due to the lack of children's skills to provide for themselves, the children suffered. A common nursery rhyme is proof.

          Ring a-round the rosy

          Pocket full of posies

          Ashes, ashes!

          We all fall down!

     Ring around the rosy: rosary beads give you God's help. A pocket full of posies: used to stop the odor of rotting bodies which was at one point thought to cause the plague, it was also used widely by doctors to protect them from the infected plague patients. Ashes, ashes: the church burned the dead when burying them became to laborious. We all fall down: dead. Not only were the children effected physically, but also mentally. Exposure to public nudity, craziness, and (obviously) abundant death was premature. The decease of family members left the children facing death and pain at an early age. Parents even abandoned their children, leaving them to the streets instead of risking the babies giving them the dreaded "pestilence". Children were especially unlucky if they were female. Baby girls would be left to die because parents would favor male children that could carry on the family name.