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 ...
Cats were a blessing during rodent infested times.
No wonder that evil superstitions got people to hate them. That’s the devil doing the devil thing.
I once knew a retired doctor from Turkey who in his general practice had treated cases of both smallpox and the plague, although I suppose not in the same person at the same time.
The stated purpose is to better understand what makes a pandemic bacteria and better design vaccines and antibiotics against it.
That may be the stated purpose of some, I’m sure others
are trying to better understand what makes a pandemic
bacteria and how to design a better one.
One of these days, it’s going to get away from them
and then we’ll find out what the dark ages were really
like.
monty python history of the world...i believe.
As holder of the GGG can you reference other historical plagues (not Biblical)?
monty python and the holy grail, thanks for a prior post nailing it.
The answer is in your question. I chose it as my handle on an aviation forum and decided to use it here as well.
D.C. is due...
It could wipe out a whole lot of things and bring this country back to a Constitutional basis for Government.
Needs to be when Congress is in Session, Obama et al are home, and the SCOTUS is in session....Hmmm...State of the Union time speaks to me...
You probably were given a plague shot. I have a shot card that says I got one in 1968.
Probably one or two. Now the GG shot was the worst
If you didn’t walk around immediately you would be
so stiff you couldn’t even sit down.
That was the one with the square needle!!
In all reality, who knows what the heck we were
shot up with, our only fear was to NOT lose your
shot card or go though it all again.
OK. I was an air traffic controller for 20 years, that is how I know about squawks. Nothing struck fear into our hearts, more, than the possibility of seeing a 7500 squawk. On 9/11, the chumps turned off the squawkers, so they could not be followed very closely. I worked in radar and I can assure you, it was almost impossible to watch aircraft, when their transponders were turned off. Later bro.
Plague is treatable. My child survived bubonic plague.
Originally, I thought it was the flu but an alert intern drew a blood culture which showed the real cause of her disease. It takes 3 days to grow a culture and that’s when I almost lost my child. Waiting for the results is what’s deadly.
The vector was a flea from a dead squirrel. Stay away from dead animals.
I remember I rented a plane a few days after 9/11 (airspace in Canada opened a couple of days before the US) and posted at the FBO was the starkest memo I’d ever seen. It was from the US government stating that any aircraft crossing the border would be fired upon without warning.
On the Biblical front, I while the term plague itself is arguably a loan word from the Hebrew term for “blow,” the idea of the ten plagues of Egypt is largely a problem of editors etc. projecting second millennium European history onto a Biblical narrative.
Not to mention people also decided that cats were evil and were killing them for fun...the kitties could have saved some of those people from a horrific death...
He’s been at a pretty good trot!
DDT
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