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DNA Confirms Cause of 1665 London's Great Plague (bbc.com)
Slashdot reader JThaddeus writes: The BBC reports that a 17th-century mass grave uncovered in London confirms the identity of the bacteria responsible for the Great Plague of 1665-1666. "Testing in Germany confirmed the presence of DNA from the Yersinia pestis bacterium -- the agent that causes bubonic plague -- rather than another pathogen." The grave contains approximately 3,500 skeletons... Teeth were removed from some of the skulls, and their pulp tested at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. Positive results were found in 5 of 20 individuals tested.
"To reassure anyone worried whether plague bacterium was released from the excavation work or scientific analysis, it doesn't survive in the ground," reports the BBC. The 3,500 graves represent roughly 3.5% of London's 100,000 victims of the Great Plague -- one-quarter of the city's entire population.
"To reassure anyone worried whether plague bacterium was released from the excavation work or scientific analysis, it doesn't survive in the ground," reports the BBC. The 3,500 graves represent roughly 3.5% of London's 100,000 victims of the Great Plague -- one-quarter of the city's entire population.
The summary suggests that some "what terror have you unleashed?!" doomsday scenario could unfold with Yersinia Pestis being resurrected from extinction... but that's impossible. Yersinia Pestis still exists and causes about a dozen cases of bubonic plague annually, nowadays. It's easily treated with antibiotics, and those of European descent are thought to be resistant to it. If I recall my Wikipedia correctly.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
The thing to reassure people of is the fact the bubonic plague is treatable now unlike back then not that it can't live in the ground as that is a fairly pointless reassurance as the bacteria is still very much alive and well in the world. It still occasionally raises its head with outbreaks and results in 100+ deaths a year.
Whatever you do, never just move the headstones.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Did you even read the article or the headline at all???
"To reassure anyone worried whether plague bacterium was released from the excavation work or scientific analysis, it doesn't survive in the ground," reports the BBC.
What's this obsession with old bones?
The people are gone. Those who mourned them are gone. Burn the remains and let vegetation reclaim the minerals.
I think the "rule of thumb" in the UK at least is that you own your plot for 70 years after which it's fair game, although the habbit of being buryed with or next to your spouse and / or children presumably resets the clock.
The historic practice was that when the graveyard got full the oldest plots would be dug up and the bones would be placed in the ossuary (typically a small stone "tomb" you still see in some old graveyards) When the ossuary was full the bones would be removed and burnt on a "Bone Pyre" which is the origin of the word Bonfire. A lot of small village churches have tiny graveyards, with room for only a 2 dozen plots if that, still I'd imagine the Bury-Exhume-Inter-Burn cycle probably took over a century and it's unlikely that anybody particularly cared about who was getting cremated at that point.
Yeah, free dental care up to the age of 18, plus free dental care to those who can't afford it after that, and free dental care to those over 65.
What fucking bastards. Looking after people's teeth. For free! I mean, what fucks?! They should be paying a third-party for-profit company at least a thousand dollars a year for that, right?!
Fucking nanny states, making sure we're looked after, get to a dentists, have dentistry work and orthodontics that would cost tens of thousands in other countries, and that we get it for free. Almost like a... well, a nanny. Who cares for our kids.
Fucking moron.
You're a moron:
https://www.gov.uk/government/...
"There are no records since 1981 of any person being infected as a result of disturbing soil for building or any other purpose." (35 years, and that's probably only because there were no records kept before that)
"There is no evidence of any worker or member of the public being infected with anthrax as the results of development of brownfield sites including abattoirs and tanneries, areas traditionally associated with anthrax, or greenfield sites previously used for livestock."
The others are all pretty much the same, you only have to do a bit of Googling.
Or you could use your brain and say "I have no fucking idea where the soil in my garden has come from, what it might have had, who it might have been buried with over millions of years of diseases and plagues, and yet I don't die whenever I turn it over".
Sure, eating that shit probably isn't a great idea because there are all kinds of fungi, spores and bacteria in it. But no less in plague pits from hundreds of years ago than in a bag you get from B&Q today. Fuck, most of the peat we use is tens of thousands of years old.
If that's the real reason, rather than preserving those sites (if they are scheduled sites for archaeology, for example), then Edinburgh need to hire some fucking scientists. If only they had a university...
If you can catch it from the soil, it's still active and killing people in the local area every day. That's not what's happening. Disturbing soil a couple of hundreds years old is like the crap that the pyramid had curses and diseases in them. Absolute bollocks. After that period of time, anything that can infect a host would have been without hosts for hundreds of years, and would have died at the first winter.
What's an aleppo?
Aleppo is the absence of leppo.
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Interestingly, I believe we still haven't conclusively determined yet that the Black Death was also caused by Yersinia pestis. Some interesting alternative explanations exist. Or at least they did a few years ago.
The fact that Y. pestis is responsible for the Black Death was conclusively determined a few years ago. In fact, the paleopathologist quoted in the featured article, Dr. Kirsten Bos, is the first author of a 2011 Nature paper presenting a genome of Yersinia pestis recovered from the remains of victims of the Black Death:
Kirsten I. Bos*, Verena J. Schuenemann*, G. Brian Golding, Hernán A. Burbano, Nicholas Waglechner, Brian K. Coombes, Joseph B. McPhee, Sharon N. DeWitte, Matthias Meyer, Sarah Schmedes, James Wood, David J. D. Earn, D. Ann Herring, Peter Bauer, Hendrik N. Poinar, Johannes Krause. “A draft genome of Yersinia pestis from victims of the Black Death”. Nature 478: 506–510. doi:10.1038/nature10549
You might be willing to compromise on this for the sake of practicality, but I am not.
What is there to compromise if I don't share you veneration of dead bone?
Rhapsody in Numbers