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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?
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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,
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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 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)
"...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.
From the sheer paranoia in your second point, I think you've already been infected with something. I hope it's not contagious.
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.
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.
Hmmm. I donno about that. Went thru quite a bit of contaminant analysis when my son had "an allergy" but we couldn't figure out what. (turned out to be wheat, verified via blood test; why they couldn't run the blood test first before analyzing our environment mystifies me) Look at what spews out of a smokestack, or a decrepit diesel bus exhaust, or the literal stench of curing plastic inside a new particle board kitchen, then get back to me on the environment being too clean. The air inside an average house, or even outside a non-rural house, is pretty stinking filthy compared to a rural environment a century ago...
Add in plenty of "intentional" contaminants like unventilated kitchens, spray paint, smoking various substances, strange paint chemistries that didn't exist just decades ago...
Another example, I think I inhale more plasticizer fumes in a day, than people did in a lifetime just a century ago.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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.
Venter didn't create life from scratch. His team rebuilt a bacterial genome out of pre-existing parts and threw them into a pre-existing chassis. To provide out an ever-faithful computer analogy, he basically installed Gentoo on some Mycoplasma genitalium. It wasn't that exciting, just more laborious.
Which brings me to the second point: that much DNA synthesis and construct assembly is absurdly expensive. Even to transfer the dangerous parts into another bacterium via a plasmid vector would be unwieldly labourious, mostly because you'd have to figure out what the parts are, first.
Which brings me to the third point: it is infinitely cheaper just to buy more traditional forms of weaponry than to swallow the startup cost for biological warfare. Even to poison an entire town's drinking water with lethal amounts of Brevetoxin would be cheaper. You can basically chill out now.
P.S., Caucasians probably have serious herd immunity against the most famous strains by now and don't even know it. Even if you get the work perfect, its reliability would still be a bad gamble.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
So Kivrin Engle would indeed survive? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Book_(novel)
Asthma incidence has strong correlation to having parents who smoke. Allergy incidence to those who were not breastfed but consumed formula.
Craig Venter did NOT "create life from scratch", he put a modified Mycoplasma genitalium genome into a mycoplasma. His team "stripped down" the genome to find a minimal set that would support life, then added some "nonsense" like encoded people's names and a web site address. Then they sythesized that sequence and injected it. To put it another way, just because you download a kernel from kernel.org, rip out everything that won't support your particular machine, compile and install it...doesn't make you a Linus who "built his own kernel from scratch".
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
Thanks, I'm not a biologist. Probably read too much science fiction though!
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!
OP seems to be talking about bacterial infections and other biological issues, rather than air contaminants from paint fumes or what have you. This is not to suggest modern air pollution is less dangerous, simply that it's not the same thing as an infection. While there's probably more junk in the air, it seems that less of it is biological.
To provide out an ever-faithful computer analogy, he basically installed Gentoo on some Mycoplasma genitalium. It wasn't that exciting
I dunno, even *that* doesn't sound particularly exciting given that someone already managed to
install VuDu Linux on a dead badger several years ago.
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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.
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.
I'd think it would just be cheaper to buy your WMDs from the US, like Iraq did. All you have to do is wave a little oil under their nose and the pigs in Washington will roll over and let you suckle at all the teats simultaneously.
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.
If I've learned anything from how the CIA operates, you don't "buy your WMDs" from the US; the US picks you to sell WMDs to. We only hear about these things when they mess up.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Or when they send Donald Rumsfeld over with the bill of lading to glad hand your dictator. :)
But yeah, generally if you're getting them it's because you're going to use them on people the US wants targeted, or because it's going to destabilize your country so they can put in someone more useful to American interests.
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.
I'm confused, who's Linus in the analogy, the FSM?
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.