Irish famine

K. David Patterson. Typhus and its control in Russia, 1870-1940. Medical History. 37 (1993) 361-381. Source for the Russian epidemic Irish famine known treatments typhus defined and laundresses. 

See Griffith s The Economics of Irish Famine , United Irishman, 6 December 1902, p. 5, and How Ireland has Prospered Under English Rule and The Slave Mind (New York Irish Progressive League [Donnelly Press], not dated). 

Q/n theyears 1845-1850, a fungal infection of potatoes (Solanum tuberosum L) with Phytophtora infestans was rife in Ireland this led to a starvation, known as the Great Irish Famine", as a result of which, more than a million people died and two million emigrated. 

O Grada, Cormac. 1999. Black 47 and Beyond The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory. Princeton, N.J. Princeton University Press. 

In Britain, Leblanc pollution went uncontrolled for decades. A visitor outside Liverpool, a major Leblanc factory center, described in 1846 a sordid ugly town. The sky is a low-hanging roof of smeary smoke. The atmosphere is a blend of railway tunnel, hospital ward, gas works and open sewer. The features of the place are chimneys, furnaces, steam jets, smoke clouds and coal mines. The products are pills, coal, glass, chemicals, cripples, millionaires and paupers. An estimated 40,000 men, women, and children— many of them Irish escaping the potato famine—worked in British Leblanc factories. Until 1875, workers stirred batches of chemicals in a cloud of hydrochloric acid gas. Their teeth decayed, and their clothing burned. Inhaling deeply could make them faint and vomit. 

One fungus (potato blight) caused the Irish potato famine of the nineteenth century and the vari-ous blights, blotches, rots, rusts, smuts, and mildews can overwhelm any crop in a short time. Especially now that so much is grown in Western Europe in winter, fungal diseases are a real threat. 

The Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s illustrates what can occur when a staple food crop is stricken by a disease against which there is no known defense. The potato crop was virtually destroyed by severe attacks of thefungal disease known as potato late blight, resulting in the deaths of more than a million people. 

Historically, the potato blight in Ireland dnring the mid-eighteenth century was the canse of a famine that led to mass emigration by poor Irish peasants to North America between 1846 and 1851. The destmcticn of the potato crop in Ireland, the staple for the mass of poor Irish, was caused by a hmgns disease. Potatoes are also vulnerable to insect infestations. 

Fungal diseases of crops have had a major impact on history. The devastating effect of Phytophthora infestans on the Irish potato crop and the resultant famine in 1845 led to a significant emigration to the United States. 

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