Posted on 01/27/2014 5:08:06 PM PST by John W
An international team of scientists has discovered that two of the most devastating pandemics in human history -- responsible for killing as much as half the population in Europe at the time -- were caused by strains of the same bacterium.
The researchers announced Monday that the Plague of Justinian and the Black Death were caused by distinct strains of the same pathogen, and warned that similar pandemics can strike again.
The Plague of Justinian struck in the 6th century and is estimated to have killed between 30 and 50 million people -- virtually half the world’s population as it spread across Asia, North Africa, parts of the Middle East and Europe.
The Black Death struck about 800 years later, killing an estimated 50 million Europeans between just 1347 and 1351 alone.
Researchers were able to isolate miniscule DNA fragments from the 1500-year-old teeth of two victims of the Plague of Justinian who were buried in Bavaria, Germany. They then reconstructed the genome of the oldest Yersinia pestis, the bacterium responsible for these plagues, and compared it to a database of genomes of more than a hundred contemporary strains.
The bacterium Yersinia pestis has jumped from rodents to humans throughout history, and Poinar said rodent reservoirs of plague still exist today in parts of Asia and Ukraine.
"What (the study) does seem to suggest is that obviously Yersinia pestis has this tremendous capability of emerging and re-emerging from these centres with these rodents," said Hendrik Poinar, director of the McMaster Ancient DNA Centre.
(Excerpt) Read more at ctvnews.ca ...
I thought they changed the genus from Yersinia to Pasturella. Antibiotics have worked, but if it ever becomes a superbug it could be a nightmare.
I think the last case here in Oregon was a guy trying to rescue a rodent (chipmunk or squirrel?) from a feral cat.
I don’t consider plague to be a serious danger anymore because most people change and wash their bedding on a regular basis nowadays and there are plenty of effective flea and rodent control products on the markets.
We can always break out the DDT to stop the flea vector if another pandemic occurs.
It’s a Monty Python routine.
Absolutely true, and again, related to the plague. The Iranian people are considered steppe people, although we might tend to picture them as desert-dwelling arab-types. They are quite different. The Sassanid Persians were fighting the Byzantines to a bit of a standstill (that was always the case) and at about that time, plague came in off the steppes and devastated the urban centers.
The Arabs came out of the desert full of Islam, and the Persians were in no shape to stop them, and the Byzantines were in no shape to stop them. The die was cast.
That’s the benign half of the story.
Anyone out there remember the rabbit drives here in SE Idaho back in the early 1980’s? The libs were screaming bloody murder. National news. And it WAS bloody murder and yes I HELPED, but the territory covered by those drives was insignificant to area(s) infested. The jack rabbits in a huge amount of territory died off naturally probably through Tularemia. Rabbit plague. In the last 3 years we are seeing their return. And that is 30 YEARS LATER PEOPLE.
What is more significant to me is this last round of flu I am just recovering from. I had every flu symptom described ALL AT ONCE. And it don’t feel like it has quite let go 2 weeks later. The good news is I seem to be getting better. Just in time for the funeral of along time friend (63) that died last Thursday-—of the flu.
Is 40 the correct answer?
42.
What is the other half?
cheap chinese blankets imported from mexico
Yeah. Me too. Nasty flu this year. I usually don’t get sick.
No, not meaning of the universe, but how the plague came to the Americas.
With the Chinese railworkers, or was it prostitutes?
Plague first came to the United States in the 1850's. The rail companies were importing Chinese Coolies to work on the transcontinental railway.
There was a small plague outbreak in San Francisco's Chinatown district. An alert doctor spotted the outbreak almost immediately, and appealed to the city council to institute a quarantine and rat catching program.
The town fathers refused to believe there was plague in their fair city.
They screwed around long enough for it to infect the local ground squirrel population where there was no hope stopping it from spreading. Thanks to their inaction, one can be exposed to plague anywhere in the western US.
Any parallels one wishes to draw with a more recent "gay plague" are left to the reader as an exercise.
Those who do not learn the lessons of the past...
The good news about the Black Death is it greatly increased the value of labor and led to more individual freedom for commoners.
In the 1950s the democrat party had a think tank devoted to how Guam would deal with this problem.
At the time there was also a lot of WWII surplus aircraft, the idea that emerged after their study was that the mainland could land some of those surplus aircraft on one half of the island, as it sank under the waves the pathogens would be rinsed off of that half of the island, at the same time, so would the surplus aircraft fall off and sink, that would cause the submerged portion of the island to abruptly rise up in the air, forcing water down and over the remaining dry portion, thereby giving a thorough rinse to the entire island.
Once the bobbing island settled down, then the rebuilding and repairs could get started.
Naw, other way around. Alexandre Yersin was credited as the discoverer after quite a bit of scientific squabbling. I believe that took place in 1967. When I was studying microbiology in the early 70's there were certain retrograde professors of mine who refused to go along. A Japanese scientist named Kitasato Shibasaburō was a rival claimant for primacy.
maybe it is only the mods that notice but i jest get sicker
They can't; it would cause the island to tip over...
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