paragraph_text: Jean-Sélim Kanaan (July 28, 1970 – August 19, 2003) was a United Nations (UN) diplomat, Egyptian, Italian and French national, who was killed in the Canal Hotel bombing in Baghdad, Iraq, along with Sérgio Vieira de Mello and other members of his staff. Born in Rome, Italy, he was the son of an Egyptian UN diplomat, and he spoke seven languages.

paragraph_text: The first European epidemic of the bubonic plague dates back to the mid 6th century and is called the Plague of Justinian. The largest plague epidemic was the Black Death in Europe in the 14th century. In medieval times, the large loss of people (due to the bubonic plague) in a town created an economic disaster. Community plague doctors were quite valuable and were given special privileges; for example, plague doctors were freely allowed to perform autopsies, which were otherwise generally forbidden in Medieval Europe, to research a cure for the plague.In some cases, plague doctors were so valuable that when Barcelona dispatched two to Tortosa in 1650, outlaws captured them en route and demanded a ransom. The city of Barcelona paid for their release. The city of Orvieto hired Matteo fu Angelo in 1348 for four times the normal rate of a doctor of 50-florin per year. Pope Clement VI hired several extra plague doctors during the Black Death plague. They were to attend to the sick people of Avignon. Of 18 doctors in Venice, only one was left by 1348: five had died of the plague, and 12 were missing and may have fled.

paragraph_text: Classical immunology ties in with the fields of epidemiology and medicine. It studies the relationship between the body systems, pathogens, and immunity. The earliest written mention of immunity can be traced back to the plague of Athens in 430 BCE. Thucydides noted that people who had recovered from a previous bout of the disease could nurse the sick without contracting the illness a second time. Many other ancient societies have references to this phenomenon, but it was not until the 19th and 20th centuries before the concept developed into scientific theory.

paragraph_text: Plague 99 () is a 1989 novel written by Jean Ure. It tells the story of a pandemic that shuts down London, and a group of three teenagers that survive the outbreak. The book takes an apocalyptic view and details the experiences of the three principal characters at the end of the year 1999, as the plague wipes out the population of London in the course of a few weeks. It was written during the Cold War and reflects many aspects of the fears of the time. The principal characters are Fran, her best friend Harriet, and a schoolmate, Shahid.

paragraph_text: In England, in the absence of census figures, historians propose a range of preincident population figures from as high as 7 million to as low as 4 million in 1300, and a postincident population figure as low as 2 million. By the end of 1350, the Black Death subsided, but it never really died out in England. Over the next few hundred years, further outbreaks occurred in 1361–62, 1369, 1379–83, 1389–93, and throughout the first half of the 15th century. An outbreak in 1471 took as much as 10–15% of the population, while the death rate of the plague of 1479–80 could have been as high as 20%. The most general outbreaks in Tudor and Stuart England seem to have begun in 1498, 1535, 1543, 1563, 1589, 1603, 1625, and 1636, and ended with the Great Plague of London in 1665.

paragraph_text: The Black Death ravaged much of the Islamic world. Plague was present in at least one location in the Islamic world virtually every year between 1500 and 1850. Plague repeatedly struck the cities of North Africa. Algiers lost 30 to 50 thousand inhabitants to it in 1620–21, and again in 1654–57, 1665, 1691, and 1740–42. Plague remained a major event in Ottoman society until the second quarter of the 19th century. Between 1701 and 1750, thirty-seven larger and smaller epidemics were recorded in Constantinople, and an additional thirty-one between 1751 and 1800. Baghdad has suffered severely from visitations of the plague, and sometimes two-thirds of its population has been wiped out.

paragraph_text: ``The Masque of the Red Death '', originally published as`` The Mask of the Red Death: A Fantasy'' (1842), is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. The story follows Prince Prospero's attempts to avoid a dangerous plague, known as the Red Death, by hiding in his abbey. He, along with many other wealthy nobles, hosts a masquerade ball within seven rooms of the abbey, each decorated with a different color. In the midst of their revelry, a mysterious figure disguised as a Red Death victim enters and makes his way through each of the rooms. Prospero dies after confronting this stranger, whose ``costume ''proves to contain nothing tangible inside it; the guests also die in turn.

paragraph_text: In 1466, perhaps 40,000 people died of the plague in Paris. During the 16th and 17th centuries, the plague was present in Paris around 30 per cent of the time. The Black Death ravaged Europe for three years before it continued on into Russia, where the disease was present somewhere in the country 25 times between 1350 to 1490. Plague epidemics ravaged London in 1563, 1593, 1603, 1625, 1636, and 1665, reducing its population by 10 to 30% during those years. Over 10% of Amsterdam's population died in 1623–25, and again in 1635–36, 1655, and 1664. Plague occurred in Venice 22 times between 1361 and 1528. The plague of 1576–77 killed 50,000 in Venice, almost a third of the population. Late outbreaks in central Europe included the Italian Plague of 1629–1631, which is associated with troop movements during the Thirty Years' War, and the Great Plague of Vienna in 1679. Over 60% of Norway's population died in 1348–50. The last plague outbreak ravaged Oslo in 1654.

paragraph_text: The plague struck various countries in the Middle East during the pandemic, leading to serious depopulation and permanent change in both economic and social structures. As it spread to western Europe, the disease entered the region from southern Russia also. By autumn 1347, the plague reached Alexandria in Egypt, probably through the port's trade with Constantinople, and ports on the Black Sea. During 1347, the disease travelled eastward to Gaza, and north along the eastern coast to cities in Lebanon, Syria and Palestine, including Ashkelon, Acre, Jerusalem, Sidon, Damascus, Homs, and Aleppo. In 1348–49, the disease reached Antioch. The city's residents fled to the north, most of them dying during the journey, but the infection had been spread to the people of Asia Minor.[citation needed]

paragraph_text: The plague disease, caused by Yersinia pestis, is enzootic (commonly present) in populations of fleas carried by ground rodents, including marmots, in various areas including Central Asia, Kurdistan, Western Asia, Northern India and Uganda. Nestorian graves dating to 1338–39 near Lake Issyk Kul in Kyrgyzstan have inscriptions referring to plague and are thought by many epidemiologists to mark the outbreak of the epidemic, from which it could easily have spread to China and India. In October 2010, medical geneticists suggested that all three of the great waves of the plague originated in China. In China, the 13th century Mongol conquest caused a decline in farming and trading. However, economic recovery had been observed at the beginning of the 14th century. In the 1330s a large number of natural disasters and plagues led to widespread famine, starting in 1331, with a deadly plague arriving soon after. Epidemics that may have included plague killed an estimated 25 million Chinese and other Asians during the 15 years before it reached Constantinople in 1347.

paragraph_text: Ghazi Kanaan (1942 – 12 October 2005) (; transliterations vary), also known as Abu Yo'roub, was Syria's Interior Minister from 2004 to 2005, and long-time head of Syria's security apparatus in Lebanon. His violent death during an investigation into the assassination of Rafik Hariri drew international attention.

paragraph_text: Sparta and its allies, with the exception of Corinth, were almost exclusively land based powers, able to summon large land armies that were very nearly unbeatable. Under the direction of Pericles, the Athenians pursued a policy of retreat within the city walls of Athens, relying on Athenian maritime supremacy for supply while the superior Athenian navy harassed Spartan troop movements. Unfortunately the strategy also resulted in adding many people from the countryside to an already well - populated city, introducing a severe crowding factor as well as resource shortages. Due to the close quarters and poor hygiene exhibited at that time Athens became a breeding ground for disease and many citizens died including Pericles, his wife, and his sons Paralus and Xanthippus. In the history of epidemics the 'Plague' of Athens is remarkable for its one - sided affliction and bias on the ultimate outcome of a war.

paragraph_text: Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the first of many to present the Alps as a place of allure and beauty, banishing the prevalent conception of the mountains as a hellish wasteland inhabited by demons. Rousseau's conception of alpine purity was later emphasized with the publication of Albrecht von Haller's poem Die Alpen that described the mountains as an area of mythical purity. Late in the 18th century the first wave of Romantics such as Goethe and Turner came to admire the scenery; Wordsworth visited the area in 1790, writing of his experiences in The Prelude. Schiller later wrote the play William Tell romanticising Swiss independence. After the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the Alpine countries began to see an influx of poets, artists, and musicians, as visitors came to experience the sublime effects of monumental nature.

paragraph_text: Saint Catherine of Genoa (Caterina Fieschi Adorno, 1447 – 15 September 1510) was an Italian Roman Catholic saint and mystic, admired for her work among the sick and the poor and remembered because of various writings describing both these actions and her mystical experiences. She was a member of the noble Fieschi family, and spent most of her life and her means serving the sick, especially during the plague which ravaged Genoa in 1497 and 1501. She died in that city in 1510.

paragraph_text: Zombie Lake () is a 1981 Spanish-French horror film directed by Jean Rollin and Julian de Laserna. The film starred Howard Vernon as the mayor of a small French town that is plagued by Nazi zombies who were killed by the town's villagers 10 years earlier. It was distributed by Eurociné.

paragraph_text: Nicotine is named after the tobacco plant "Nicotiana tabacum," which in turn is named after the French ambassador in Portugal, Jean Nicot de Villemain, who sent tobacco and seeds to Paris in 1560, presented to the French King, and who promoted their medicinal use. Smoking was believed to protect against illness, particularly the plague.

paragraph_text: Bonaparte began with an army of 13,000 men; 1,500 were reported missing, 1,200 died in combat, and thousands perished from disease—mostly bubonic plague. He failed to reduce the fortress of Acre, so he marched his army back to Egypt in May. To speed up the retreat, Bonaparte ordered plague-stricken men to be poisoned with opium; the number who died remains disputed, ranging from a low of 30 to a high of 580. He also brought out 1,000 wounded men. Back in Egypt on 25 July, Bonaparte defeated an Ottoman amphibious invasion at Abukir.

paragraph_text: During the British Raj, famines in India, often attributed to failed government policies, were some of the worst ever recorded, including the Great Famine of 1876–78 in which 6.1 million to 10.3 million people died and the Indian famine of 1899–1900 in which 1.25 to 10 million people died. The Third Plague Pandemic in the mid-19th century killed 10 million people in India. Despite persistent diseases and famines, the population of the Indian subcontinent, which stood at about 125 million in 1750, had reached 389 million by 1941.

paragraph_text: The Parisian architect Jean-Charles Danjoy designed the Château Pastré, the largest of the buildings, completed in 1862. The three-story building was designed to meet the needs of its owners for a place where they could hold entertainments for many people. The "Nouvelle Revue" in its gossip section "Chronique de L'Élégance" in 1884 described a play being presented at the home of Mme Pastre.

paragraph_text: The dominant explanation for the Black Death is the plague theory, which attributes the outbreak to Yersinia pestis, also responsible for an epidemic that began in southern China in 1865, eventually spreading to India. The investigation of the pathogen that caused the 19th-century plague was begun by teams of scientists who visited Hong Kong in 1894, among whom was the French-Swiss bacteriologist Alexandre Yersin, after whom the pathogen was named Yersinia pestis. The mechanism by which Y. pestis was usually transmitted was established in 1898 by Paul-Louis Simond and was found to involve the bites of fleas whose midguts had become obstructed by replicating Y. pestis several days after feeding on an infected host. This blockage results in starvation and aggressive feeding behaviour by the fleas, which repeatedly attempt to clear their blockage by regurgitation, resulting in thousands of plague bacteria being flushed into the feeding site, infecting the host. The bubonic plague mechanism was also dependent on two populations of rodents: one resistant to the disease, which act as hosts, keeping the disease endemic, and a second that lack resistance. When the second population dies, the fleas move on to other hosts, including people, thus creating a human epidemic.

Question: How many people, at most, have died of plague in the city where Jean-Sélim Kanaan died?
Answer: two-thirds of its population