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New Study Claims That the 'Black Death' Was Spread By Humans, Not Rats (bbc.com)
dryriver shares a report from BBC: Rats were not to blame for the spread of plague during the Black Death, according to a study. The rodents and their fleas were thought to have spread a series of outbreaks in 14th-19th Century Europe. But a team from the universities of Oslo and Ferrara now says the first, the Black Death, can be "largely ascribed to human fleas and body lice." The study, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, uses records of its pattern and scale. The Black Death claimed an estimated 25 million lives, more than a third of Europe's population, between 1347 and 1351. "We have good mortality data from outbreaks in nine cities in Europe," Prof Nils Stenseth, from the University of Oslo, told BBC News. "So we could construct models of the disease dynamics [there]." He and his colleagues then simulated disease outbreaks in each of these cities, creating three models where the disease was spread by: rats, airborne transmission, and fleas and lice that live on humans and their clothes. In seven out of the nine cities studied, the "human parasite model" was a much better match for the pattern of the outbreak. It mirrored how quickly it spread and how many people it affected. "The conclusion was very clear," said Prof Stenseth. "The lice model fits best. It would be unlikely to spread as fast as it did if it was transmitted by rats. It would have to go through this extra loop of the rats, rather than being spread from person to person." Plague is still endemic in some countries of Asia, Africa and the Americas, where it persists in "reservoirs" of infected rodents. According to the World Health Organization, from 2010 to 2015 there were 3,248 cases reported worldwide, including 584 deaths. And, in 2001, a study that decoded the plague genome used a bacterium that had come from a vet in the U.S. who had died in 1992 after a plague-infested cat sneezed on him as he had been trying to rescue it from underneath a house.
Humans are disgusting! Shooting DNA at each other, like savages. I FIND IT OFFENSIVE!
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Stop the infect people from wondering around globally and such issues stay more local.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
It wasn't the rats, it was from the fleas carried by the rats. A rat bite is a rare thing, comparatively to a flea bite.
Our knowledge of plague pandemics is largely drawn from observations made since the germ theory of disease gained ascendancy in the 1880s, which coincided with the world-wide Third Plague Pandemic. There are multiple potential routes of plague bacillus transmission, so the processes observed during the recent pandemic (1855 to 1959) were used to interpret the records we had from the Second Plague Pandemic (the Black Death, from the 1340s to the late 1700s).
We have not seen a plague pandemic like the one that affected Late Medieval Europe, the conditions of living are radically different from the time and so this provides a model that matches the historical data we have.
In other recent historical plague news, population genetic analysis of modern day plague survivals, have recently provided confirming evidence that the Plague of Justinian (541–542), which was possibly even more catastrophic than the Black Death, was also due to the plague bacillus Yersinia pestis. The world-wide distribution of genetic variations is best explained by two gigantic events of adaptive radiation -- about 700 years ago and 1500 years ago.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Some time ago (a decade?) I saw a TV documentary calling into question whether the Black Death was caused by the Y. pestis bacterium.
Y. pestis was shown to be the cause of a plague outbreak in 1894. Because that plague outbreak was very similar to the symptoms of the Black Death, it was believed to be the same disease.
Eventually (around 2000?) this was questioned. Arguments against that I remember include that, where available, records of who caught the disease when in a given village were more consistent with human-to-human spread; that the 1894 plague was accompanied by very many dead rats, but medieval descriptions do not mention this; and that the required rat species wasn't actually around in most of the European places hit by the plague.
Shortly thereafter, ancient DNA evidence conclusively showed that Y. pestis was indeed the cause of the Black Death. However this research fits nicely with the objections from above.
This is a fine example of science questioning old assumptions/results, and gaining better understanding by doing so, even though a false conclusion (that BD was not caused by Y. pestis) was reached along the way by some scientists.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
It was WITCHES that had cats, that killed rats, that had lice, that had plague. But the Witches were killed off, for being - Witches.... and now the X-spurts want to blame people? C'mon - it was Witches that caused the 'cleansing' that got rid of cats that allowed lice to breed on rats..... what myth are you trying to kill, and WHY? Conspiracy Rewels.
From their abstract:
Our results support that human ectoparasites were primary vectors for plague [...]ultimately challenging the assumption that plague in Europe was predominantly spread by rats.
Basically, once there is an outbreak the speed of the outbreak can best be explained by a human-human parasite transfer. Human to rat to human would be too slow for the disease to have spread that quickly.
- But that's only half the story and the rats still play an important role:
They are the slow transfer and form the reservoir for the disease. Without a second, much slower transfer method, the plaque wouldn't have been able to cross oceans and jump from continent to continent.
People don't sleep with rats in the same bed, they don't cuddle them, share their icecream cone with them or kiss them, like I've seen them doing with dogs. Rats are therefor the perfect low infection risk reservoir. But once the number of humans increases, the total risk increases and an infection will occur and spread quickly through the faster method. Once the majority of the population is wiped out, the disease can travel with rats to a new place or stay in the rat reservoir till the population has rebound.
It was one of the contributors to universal suffrage in the UK. When we sent all of our young men off to fight, women were required to do traditionally male jobs. There was a lot of attrition in the First World War, but then even more in the 1918 pandemic. The combination of these two meant that there weren't enough able-bodied men after the war to send the women back home, which led to the Representation of the People Act 1918, which allowed women to vote in Parliamentary elections for the first time.
Amusingly, lots of people are making a big deal about this being the 100th anniversary of women being able to vote, when it was not the first time that women could vote (some were able to vote - and even be elected - in local elections before then) and most still could not, yet it was the first time that practically all men could vote. Women didn't get equal voting power to men until 1928. The 1928 act was made possible by the social changes that followed the end of WWI and the 1918 flu epidemic, when women became a significant proportion of the workforce.
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