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Scientists Sequence Black Death Bacteria
First time accepted submitter Quince alPillan writes "The bacteria behind the Black Death has a very unusual history. Its ancestor is an unassuming soil bacterium and the current strains of Yersinia pestis still infects thousands of people annually, but no longer causes the suite of horrifying symptoms associated with the medieval plagues. The radical differences, in fact, had led some to suggest that we had been blaming the wrong bacteria. Now, researchers have obtained DNA from some of London's plague victims, and confirmed that Y. pestis appears to be to blame. But the sequences also suggest that the strains of bacteria we see today may be different from the ones that rampaged through Europe."
Blackteria
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the Black Death was ugly. Imagine half the population of your entire city or town dying off in 1 or 2 years. Nasty business that.
But, that said, people really should take a more reasoned approach to disease alarmism these days. All this "This latest pandemic is going to kill us ALL!!" Chicken Little shit gets tiresome. The Littles always cite the Black Death and 1918 pandemic as if that's what we could expect from a pandemic today--all without noting the MASSIVE improvements in sanitation, medical science, vaccine research, etc. that make this scale of pandemic highly unlikely in the modern era.
The Black Death could have been stopped in its tracks if those 14th-century peasants had even an inkling of the basic medical/sanitation knowledge that even the biggest idiots among us know today. Basic stuff like "Wash your hands regularly," "Cover your mouth when you cough," and "Don't let your goddamned flea-infested farm animals wander around through your living area, moron" are surprisingly recent bits of common sense that the developed world today takes for granted. Of course, there are still some third-world shitholes where people think that a witch-doctor rubbing feces on an open wound will ward off the evil spirits. But even those places usually have a FEW among them with some basic sense (and soap).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Or not?
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
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Would not have been as easy as you say - the livestock had to be in the towns and cities for the simple reason that refrigeration wasn't around, so any meat that wasn't riddled with worms, flies and mold had to be from fresh kills. That obviously leads to dung and stuff, which before modern day sewer systems, roadsweepers and refuse collection didn't go away
(Yes I know the Romans had sewers and refuse and dung collection, but most medieval cities found the volume of shit and refuse simply overwhelmed them).
As far as I know a decent 'flu pandemic (and I'm not talking about bird 'flu) would have almost the same effect as the 1918 one, assuming it struck during say a major worldwide depression and had a decent number of weakened population as a transmission medium,
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
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If humanity is to survive, we must pledge to eliminate all carbon dioxide from our atmosphere by 2030
Isn't that going a bit far?
Trees breathe it in, we breathe it out, we aren't going to get rid of ALL of it, nor do we want to.
Or perhaps you were trying to be funny?
Actually even that description doesn't do it justice. Imagine that up to 80% of your town dies, and within weeks at that. Mortality differed from place to place and outbreak to outbreak, but generally, the tighter packed a place was, the bigger the casualties. At the larger scale of villages mortality was lower -- though even there, many villages were COMPLETELY wiped out -- but in cities, getting casualties between 50% and 75% of the total population in an outbreak wasn't unusual.
Oh, and in excruciating pain at that, as it caused the necrosis of some very sensitive spots. We have description of people listening to their town scream in agony all night, and people jumping off bridges or rooftops just to end the incredible pain. And, yeah, they didn't even have ipods to cover that constant soundtrack.
Also imagine that that happens every few years.
And that its first symptoms are something as common as sneezing. So, yeah, just being around someone with an allergy could cause you to shit your pants in terror each time they sneeze, because it COULD be the start of such a horrible epidemic.
Also imagine that you know that if you catch it, the only treatment known at the time was to board your doors and windows for two weeks and leave you to die in there, one way or another.
Yeah, it was very nasty business.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
"The authors conclude that this provides a clear indication that a single type of bacteria has been responsible for the Black Death and several other plague outbreaks, and is still causing modern diseases."
That's an interesting claim. As I understand it, the verdict is still out on what caused the Black Death. There's undeniable evidence that plague was present at the time, and they certainly found marks on bones in mass graves to indicate that some of the dead suffered from it. However, as I understand it, there's concern about whether that adequately explains the Black Death. Supposedly the epidemic swept through Europe in several phases, targeting different populations and with slightly different symptoms, and it moved very quickly, crossing borders and water at an alarming pace. That doesn't seem to describe the profile of plague, and as I understand it the academic consensus in recent years has been that there may have been something viral at work, or several different factors involved. Plague alone doesn't seem adequate here.
The greatest trick the devil pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist -- Verbal Kint
The greatest trick a god ever pulled was convincing the world that he did exist. -- Tsingi. (aka, the devil)
While everything you said is true about the vast improvements in sanitation, public health etc. you're missing two points.
1) Some of these improvements may have made our environment TOO CLEAN, we are not exposing ourselves to enough natural pathogens to challenge our immune systems and build up resistance. I've heard that one possible reason why the incidence of asthma has soared in the developing world is because children no longer play so much in dirt and get exposed to the bacteria there. Then, their immune systems become hyperactive. (I also seem to remember an article in Sci-Am about how Polio paradoxically became widely spread due to the clean drinking water or something. Hence the pictures of all those kids in "Iron Lungs" before the development of a vaccine).
2) If the scientists who sequenced the genome put it on the Internet (or if it stolen), that could be enough to build a good biological weapon. Now that Craig Venter has demonstrated the ability of creating life FROM SCRATCH isn't it feasible to create a new bacterium from the code downloaded from the Internet? Perhaps with some changes to make it more "effective"? It is no longer enough to physically sequester the pathogens in a secure location as the U.S. and Russia have done with smallpox, now just the data itself could lead to a virulent agent. (Or, knowing what to look for, it is probably much easier for a third party to duplicate these scientists' research). Perhaps, in the future, scientists who resurrect or create such dangerous micro-organisms will be required to create, as part of their work, complementary anti-bodies or iRNA sequences or something so that we would have a running start in preparing a biological defense if things got loose.
"...But the sequences also suggest that the strains of bacteria we see today may be different from the ones that rampaged through Europe."
Uh, "may" be different? Is there anyone in academia even remotely questioning this? Bacteria replicate in a matter of hours. How many generations of bacteria have turned over(read mutated) in the last few hundred years? This should not come as a surprise to anyone really.
And think about what the aztecs thought of those bearded hippies coming and killing 90% of them (small pox)? Intolerance at its worst :)
Well, these guys didn't think it was racist:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death_(American_band)
Wearing pants should always be optional.
Well, the actual question is: exactly how different. Yes, it's clear that some mutations are inevitable, but unless there's some clear evolutionary pressure, you may still find a bacterium that works by and large just like its ancestors.
Now it may seem that for a parasitic bacterium, not killing its host would be an advantage. And indeed in some other bacteria we can see a sort of a survival-of-the-sickest kind of selection.
But this is a soil bacterium. If it ends up in some host and kills it, worst that can happen is that it ends up back in the soil. It has nothing to lose by killing its host, and in fact everything to gain, since once the host is dead there's no more immune system killing the bacteria.
This kind of bacteria that have nothing to lose by killing the host are the most deadly and dangerous. Not just this, but see for example cholera too. That's a bacterium that not only has nothing to gain by peacefully staying inside you and not killing you, but is actually trying to get out of your body ASAP. Whether you live or die in the process, meh, it makes no difference for that one.
Additionally, for Y Pestis, the capability of clotting blood and forming colonies that plug blood vessels actually helped it spread too. The same mechanism makes it plug the stomach of fleas. The flea then will literally starve to death no matter how much blood it sucks, and driven by hunger, will go infect another host too.
So we have a bacterium for which the plasmid that kills its host:
1. isn't detrimental to the bacterium, since it can live just as well in a dead host or in soil, and
2. is actually beneficial to the bacterium, since it makes fleas spread it around.
That's one tough combo to evolve out of. There is no real survival benefit in losing those genes.
So while, yes, you would expect that bacteria can and will mutate in time, but it's not clear at all why this one would change in exactly that aspect.
Yet something seems to have changed. What and why? Those are the questions.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
It's not even that easy. The bug was not carried by dung or flies, but by fleas and rats. Even if you had a modern sewage system, rats were and still are not extinct. In fact, their populations seems to have grown with the human population.
What seems to have finally killed the plague in Europe was that the vulnerable and once dominant species of rat was also handicapped enough by it to be replaced with a better rat. (Yeah, sometimes nature makes a better mouse trap, and then makes a better mouse to defeat it;))
Sanitation, washing hands, etc, didn't have much to do with it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
So Kivrin Engle would indeed survive? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Book_(novel)
I just spent a week running from earthquakes and hurricanes, then got home to feel like ... black death. Convenient that the sequence is now complete so I can confirm my suspicion of the most interesting vacation ever.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Seanan McGuire has summed up the reasons why some people believe (or believed now?) that the Black Death may have been caused by something other than Yersinia Pestis in lyrical form. (Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any recordings of her performing it on YouTube.)
:)
This latest bit of research may have disproved the theory but it's still a fun song, and how often do you get to hear someone singing about epidemiology?
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
The greatest trick the catholic church ever pulled was convincing the world that god did exist.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
The Little Age was still in its early phases, but less unclouded sunshine from shorter growing seasons probably meant less calories and vitamin C for less healthy bodies, along with even lower immunity from even more inadequate vitamin D levels. Overpopulated areas were no doubt tinderboxes, waiting for the slightest bacterial innovation.
Burn her!
I know I watched a show that basically was saying that the environment we lived in was so bad back then, that it was the big difference, particularly the water.
In London, everyone just tossed their garbage, piss, and shit in the street, that combined with all the industrial runoff, and animal waste to fester in the river. The river that everyone drank from.
Some study was done with numbers collected from the time, showing that certain areas had far less victims. It was suggested that these areas, which all seemed to be around breweries and the like, were because people that drank beer instead of the water were so much better off, because the beer was all boiled which killed all the bacteria. The stupid peasants of the time not know anything about bacteria or that boiling water kills them...
To that end, I try to drink as much beer as I can. Just to be safe. That way in 100 years from now, no one will be calling me a stupid peasant.
While there's some truth to that, it is hardly foolproof and the feces thing is actually still true in some cases. Traditional medicine made (and makes) many errors.
"Tetanus of the newborn occurs through contamination of the umbilical stump (and occasionally as a complication of circumcision). Neonatal tetanus is common in some cultures that have practices that encourage infection. Some tribes in the Loralai district of Pakistan practice 'bundling,' in which the lower abdomen of the newborn is smeared with cow dung and then the child is wrapped in a sheepskin blanket. The Masai have a high neontal death rate in part due to the custom of packing the umbilical stump with cow dung."
-- The vaccine controversy: the history, use and safety of vaccinations By Kurt Link. pp71
Goes on to mention some other practices.
This sort of thing isn't unique in traditional medicine, either.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
The Littles always cite the Black Death and 1918 pandemic as if that's what we could expect from a pandemic today--all without noting the MASSIVE improvements in sanitation, medical science, vaccine research, etc. that make this scale of pandemic highly unlikely in the modern era.
"Highly unlikely"? Try virtually inevitable. If you lived near me I'd be happy to introduce you to countless doctors, including infectious disease specialists who would tell you that you could not possibly be more wrong. Unless you have the letters MD attached to the end of your name I think you should actually pay attention to people who actually know the subject matter.
I worked in a hospital infectious disease group a few years ago. Every infectious disease specialist thinks a pandemic like the ones you mentioned is virtually inevitable. Vaccines take months to years to develop and we only have them for a relatively limited number of diseases. There are countless pathogens for which we have no effective treatment other than palliative care. Bacteria and viruses are evolving quite rapidly. Our over-use of antibiotics has actually accelerated the process. Ever get a flu shot? That vaccine simply combats a handful of the strains of influenza that the CDC expects to be most problematic in the coming year. By the following year new strains have developed and previous years vaccine is close to useless. Even when we do have effective treatments for diseases, economic and geopolitical reality often make it impossible to effectively treat vast populations. We know how to eradicate polio and yet decades after having an effective treatment it still exists. Take a fast mutating pathogen like influenza and with the right mutations and our healthcare systems will be overwhelmed.
In the event of a serious pandemic the primary tool we have to combat such an event is quarantine. In other words for a huge number of pathogens we have NOTHING that is better than we had 100 years ago. There is no question that there will be pandemics in the future, the only question is how bad will they be.
So while, yes, you would expect that bacteria can and will mutate in time, but it's not clear at all why this one would change in exactly that aspect.
Pure random chance. You have to remember that bacteria exist in absolutely enormous number. Trillions upon trillions of them. Numbers so big it defies imagination. They are mutating all the time just by random chance. Most of the time these mutations are harmless and inconsequential. It is exceptionally rare that a single bacteria develops exactly the right set of mutations necessary to be problematic to humans. The problem is that when you multiply an extremely rare even times a huge number of opportunities, you actually get a fairly routine occurrence. These sorts of evolutionary mutations usually occur because of large number of opportunities for very rare events to occur. Influenza continues to be a problem because it mutates quickly. Vaccine developers are stuck playing a game of whack-a-mole with a bug that manages to evolve around any treatment we have been able to develop so far.
Making things worse, we are creating some evolutionary pressures on them through over use of antibiotics. Several of our oldest antibiotics are now effectively useless. Bugs like MRSA are very difficult to treat and literally were not a significant problem 30 years ago.
The Black Death was caused by a demon or a witch of some sort, becasue Hollywood said so.
This investigation is undermining the statements of the Catholic Church that burned thousands of medieval people to free us from witches and demons.
Was it all in vain now ?
For the sake of argument, let's say they are successful in recreating the *exact* sequence of Y. pestis that caused the Black Death. From that point, let a Bad Guy get their hands on a DNA sequencer and then figure out a way to buff it up and weaponize it for delivery so that it would even defeat the Delta 32 resisters. Oh, and create a specific antibody for it that only a select group could use. Well, F--k us all. ; \ This research needs to be TS/SCI and shoved down a deep, dark, concrete-filled desert hole somewhere.
"This latest bit of research may have disproved the theory but it's still a fun song"
Actually, it may not. In a rare moment of good reporting when this was on the news last night here in the UK they had another scientist on pointing out that they've not really gone about this particularly scientifically. They haven't for example used the same technique on bodies that were around 100 years before the black death to see if the bacteria exists there too, which would hence suggest that it isn't necessarily the bacteria they're looking for.
In other words, it seems they've basically looked at some black death bodies, found this bacteria and said "Yep, that's conclusively the bacteria to blame that is!" when it might in fact well not be.
The story here is really the technique used, not that spin on it that they've found the bacteria responsible for black death- that latter part is still just sheer speculation right now.