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Researchers: Rats Didn't Spread Black Death, Humans Did

Posted by samzenpus on from the won't-somebody-please-think-of-the-rats? dept.

concertina226 (2447056) writes "Scientists studying the human remains of plague victims found during excavations for London's new Crossrail train line have concluded that humans spread the Black Death rather than rats, a fact that could rewrite history books. University of Keele scientists, working together with Crossrail's lead archaeologist Jay Carver and osteologists from the Museum of London, analyzed the bones and teeth of 25 skeletons dug up by Crossrail. They found DNA of Yersinia pestis, which is responsible for the Black Death, on the teeth of some of the victims."

24 of 135 comments (clear)

  1. Zombies by Garybaldy · · Score: 2

    That black death was actually zombies. The teeth says it all.

  2. Old News by wisnoskij · · Score: 5, Informative

    Scientists discovered this at least 6 years ago when I watched a documentary about it, and most likely quite a bit before that.

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    1. Re:Old News by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 2

      Scientists discovered this at least 6 years ago when I watched a documentary about it, and most likely quite a bit before that.

      I also recall reading about this years ago. Iceland was mentioned as a solid case of anti-rat evidence. Rats did not live there (and mostly still don't) but the Black Death still wiped out much of the population of Reykjavik.

    2. Re:Old News by BitZtream · · Score: 2

      Rats did not live there (and mostly still don't)

      Hahahah yea, sure they don't.

      There are rats on Antarctica, someone in Iceland is just living in denial.

      Where people go, rats and roaches go.

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    3. Re:Old News by knightghost · · Score: 3, Funny

      I have neither rats nor cockroaches where I live. Well, at least not counting the politicians.

    4. Re:Old News by Concerned+Onlooker · · Score: 4, Informative

      "the fact that some transmission was not by rats does NOT imply
      that no transmission was done by rats."

      What it DOES imply is that no matter who does the research or what the conclusion there is going to be disagreement from armchair scientists and contrarians on Slashdot.

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    5. Re:Old News by letherial · · Score: 5, Funny

      We know you wont google it in a house with a mouse, but would you google it in a car, or a plane? how about in a box, with a fox? You may like it you will see, how about in a tree?

    6. Re:Old News by flyingfsck · · Score: 2

      Dr Zeus I presume.

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      Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
    7. Re: Old News by charlesjo488 · · Score: 2

      This is what makes Slashdot so great. Thank you.

  3. Virus? Plague? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Now I'm not sure they got even the disease right! How am I supposed to believe they got the minutiae of the actual new findings right?

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    Ezekiel 23:20
    1. Re:Virus? Plague? by RDW · · Score: 2

      There's a better article on the UK Channel 4 site (C4 will broadcast the documentary):

      http://www.channel4.com/info/p...

    2. Re:Virus? Plague? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 5, Informative

      At the risk of sounding pretentious, that page doesn't list anything I haven't already known for years - in fact, anyone interested in the Black Death should be already aware of all these things.

      We've known that some casualties were not bubonic but pneumonic cases, as well as that some were septicemic instead - even the contemporaries were aware of the three distinct forms of the disease, as manifested by their different symptoms, even if they misunderstood its bacterial underpinnings. We've also known that besides primary pneumonic plague (acquired through inhalation), there's secondary pneumonic plague that happens whenever Yersinia pestis spreads into a bubonic or septicemic plague victim's lungs through the bloodstream.

      Claiming that we found out that "Rats Didn't Spread Black Death, Humans Did" feels like disingenous piece of reporting, though, because one of the hallmarks of pneumonic plague is its much more rapid onset and considerable lethality (about half the time it takes for bubonic plague to kill you, or something like that?). Within a town, it's entirely possible that the spread of pneumonic plague overtook bubonic plague whenever it got established, but the "spread" of Black Death was global, and the typical progress of pneumonic plague put it at a serious disadvantage when it came to long-distance travel (especially on ships). So chances are that in many, if not most places removed from other places (towns, regions, countries, continents), the primary pneumonic cases were "jumpstarted" by a case secondary pneumonic plague infection resulting from an infected flea bite. (At least, that's how I interpreted the smart books.)

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    3. Re:Virus? Plague? by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 4, Funny

      Cut the researchers some slack - it's a simple misunderstanding. One of these guys went to the dentist and was told they had plaque on their teeth.

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  4. actually, it was the fleas. by somepunk · · Score: 5, Informative

    Pneumonic plague being transmitted by air isn't news. It's a form of the disease that gets into your lungs, after all. Also, the primary vector isn't rats at all, but fleas, which often go directly from person to person.

    The article's credibility is not helped at all when it mentions the plague virus, when it is actually caused by a bacterium.

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    1. Re:actually, it was the fleas. by hey! · · Score: 5, Informative

      Person who worked for years in arthropod borne disease control here.

      Except for the reporting screw-up about virus vs. bacteria, this is all just quibbling. The reporters got it wrong as usual, but that doesn't mean that the researchers got it wrong.

      Zoonotic diseases (ones that spills over from one animal population to another) always have fantastically complex life cycles. In epidemics of zoonotic diseases it's common for epizootic transmission (transmission between species) to be overtaken by enzootic transmission (transmission *within* a species). For example influenza is a bird pathogen that can cross over into mammalian species like swine and humans. If flu epidemics didn't shift gears from epizootic transmission (bird to human) to enzootic (human to human), they wouldn't be as big a deal. Just stay away from chickens.

      So the idea that the black plague was primarily spread among humans enzootically is hardy groundbreaking epidemiology. It certainly doesn't mean that it's not dangerous to live in a place infested with plague-ridden rats. But the shift to enzootic transmission is something that's a bit different from the mosquito or tick borne diseases or occasional, isolated epizootic plague infections we're largely familiar with today.

      It's a neat finding, in that it wasn't necessarily expected, but it makes sense in retrospect. In something like West Nile Virus, the natural focus of the pathogen is migratory bird populations that fly thousands of miles. But while a rat can hop on a ship and travel thousands of miles, the vast majority of rats spend their entire lives in a radius of a few hundred feet. Humans are much more mobile than rats; even if a few rats hitch a ride on a ship, they never go anywhere far *without* humans.

      What's simplistic is the assumption there has to be only *one* factor involved in a zoonotic epidemic. Without epizootic transmission the plague would not have happened in the first place. That's not news. Without human-to-human enzootic transmission it would not have spread so widely or kill such a high percentage of the population. That is news (I guess -- I didn't work with people doing plauge so I have no direct knowledge of what people in that field thought). Of course before it becomes established science it's going to have to stand up to criticism for a few years.

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    2. Re:actually, it was the fleas. by hey! · · Score: 2

      Well, I'm not sure what "people" you are talking about, but if you're talking about "researchers", the answer would be "no". Researchers are definitely not representative of general population of what they "like" and "dislike".

      Two war stories follow.

      Some researchers in a tropical medicine discovered that a mens room at the school had been infested with tiny little flies. Did they complain to the management? No. They trapped some of the flies, brought them back to the lab and bred them as pets.

      I was walking in the woods one day with a zoologist friend of mine, when we came upon a rotting coyote head in the middle of the trail. "Ooh!" she says, "I want to show that to my students!" Whereupon she picks up the head, maggot-ridden eyeholes and all, and pops it into the pocket of her windbreaker.

      So no, I don't think anti-rat bias is a problem for researchers.

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    3. Re:actually, it was the fleas. by hey! · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Well, the Norway (aka "brown") rats are carriers of an almost incredible variety of infectious agents that are human pathogens, including hantavirus and Toxoplasma.

      The issue with rats isn't that they're *particularly* susceptible to zoonotic pathogens. The issue is that they're well adapted to living around human habitations,which provide them with excellent protection from predation. With plenty food and shelter and no predators, they reach unnaturally high population concentrations. These populations are "preyed upon" by germs instead of carnivores, because inevitably everything in nature is food for something else. Some of those pathogens will also effect humans, and since those dense colonies are living in close proximity to dense colonies of *humans*, brown rats present a public health concern, even though none of their pathogens have quite the marquee name recognition of The Black Death.

      Another example of this phenomenon is the raccoon. Because raccoons are still frequently encountered in natural settings people don't have the same revulsion towards them as they do towards rats, but raccoons are just as well adapted to living with humans as rats are. In places where high raccoon populations live in close proximity to humans, they're a serious health concern. I've known natural science geeks -- people who have no qualms about handing dead animals or picking through animal scat -- to treat suburban raccoons with revulsion. A suburban raccoon can be a terrifying bag of disease, and there are documented cases of people dying as a result of handling their poop.

      It doesn't mean racoons are *bad*, or that rats are *bad*. It means that wild animal populations with nearly unlimited resources and no predation are an all-you-can-eat banquet for germs.

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    4. Re:actually, it was the fleas. by fyngyrz · · Score: 2

      The issue is that [rats are] well adapted to living around human habitations,which provide them with excellent protection from predation.

      So, don't reflexively kill all the cats, then?

      By mid July of 1665 over 1,000 deaths per week were reported in the city. It was rumored that dogs and cats spread the disease, so the Lord Mayor ordered all the dogs and cats destroyed. Author Daniel Defoe (1660 – 24 April 1731) in his Journal of the Plague Years estimated that 40,000 dogs and 200,000 cats were killed.

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  5. Maybe by dreamchaser · · Score: 4, Informative

    The plague can take 3 forms, at least one of which, pneumonic, infects the lungs and spreads through the air, much like the common cold does. Just because humans had a role in helping to spread it doesn't leave the rats and their fleas off the hook. It is still quite likely that there were multiple vectors combined that caused the rapid spread of the disease.

  6. "Found Yersinia Pestis DNA on victim's teeth" by rmdingler · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Famine was widespread. Perhaps this one group unearthed during construction developed a taste for the rat.

    Not normally considered a delicacy, when it's rat or nothing, well, sorry Templeton.

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  7. Re:Zombies? by JMJimmy · · Score: 2

    Or maybe they were just eating rat?

  8. One excludes the other? by houghi · · Score: 2

    Sicne when does one exclude the other?

    Onky SOME had the DNA. What about the others?
    From what I remeber goint to school. The rats hellped spreading the plague, because they had access to the homes and the cities. This ment that even closing the doors and even city gates did not stop the spreading.

    It might have slowed it down a little bit, but rats (or rather the fleas on the rats) still had access to the humans.
    Then when it was inside a house or a city, contact between huimans helped spreading it further and faster.

    I am sure if you look further, dogs might have had fleas as well and thus also spread it.

    --
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  9. "Humans did" by Mister+Liberty · · Score: 2

    Specifically: Brits did. Worse than rats.

  10. Dumb question by hessian · · Score: 2

    If they vomited, and the vomitus contained the bacteria, would that account for these findings?

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    Futurist Traditionalism