BLACK DEATH PLAGUE fears: Holidaymakers die after eating marmot meat – plane QUARANTINED

A PLANE was raised by medics in anti-contamination suits after two passengers died after contracting the bubonic plague, sparking an airport lockdown.

00:39, Sat, May 4, 2019 | UPDATED: 09:19, Sat, May 4, 2019

plague

The husband has only named only as Citizen T (Image: SIBERIAN TIMES)

Up to 11 passengers were shepherded off the plane which had made an emergency landing in Mongolia. They were sent for hospital checks immediately, the Siberian Times reports. The husband and wife had eaten meat from a marmot, a large rat-like rodent.

Bubonic Plague: Symptoms and spread of disease explained

The plague began in the UK and Europe in 1347 due to fleas living on rats.

A special medical facility at the airport in Ulaanbaatar examined other passengers after paramedics boarded the plane from provincial posts set up as soon as the plane landed.

Around 158 people have been quarantined as a result of the incident.

The husband has been named only as Citizen T, aged 38, and he died on April 27.

His pregnant wife, 37, died three days after he did, and has not been named.

Tragically, their four children have been orphaned.

plague

The highly contagious and deadly disease spread through trade routes (Image: SIBERIAN TIMES)

The plague is still evident today and is most common in Madagascar, according to data from the World Health Organisation (WHO).

It is the most seriously affected country in the world and, although large outbreaks of the disease are rare, it is also endemic in the Congo and Peru.

The bubonic plague, also known as the Black Death or the Black Plague, hit the UK in 1348 after it originated in China.

plague

The husband and wife had eaten meat from a marmot (Image: GETTY)

The highly contagious and deadly disease spread through trade routes across Europe and arrived on the British Isles from the then-English province of Gascony.

Rats were the hosts of the Y pestis bacteria which carried the illness, which spread to one of the most devastating epidemics in history.

It wiped out around 60 percent of the population, which not only caused a huge decrease in labour and rise in wage demands, but tensions between classes in Britain.

In 1362 the plague returned to Britain, this time causing the death of around 20 percent of the population.

One of the final outbreaks of the plague was in 1665, which mainly spread throughout the Capital and was called the Great Plague of London.

It is estimated between three and 7million people died during the Black Death, the most serious of the outbreaks.

Symptoms include chills, fever, extreme weakness, diarrhoea, vomiting, abdominal pain, bleeding from the mouth, nose and rectum and blackening of the skin tissue - hence the name the Black Death.