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.

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This Is Very Interesting

[crunchygranola]

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.