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To: Doctor Stochastic
Your comment about dying rats is, or at least should be imnnho, the central point about the spread of Y. pestis. The sundry species of fleas (particularly but by no means exclusively Xenopsylla cheopis) in whose guts Y. pestis apparently prefers to live and has done for evidently some millenia, seem themselves to have 3 or 4 preferred species of rats as a host, possibly most famously the common black or ship rat, Rattus rattus.

There seems, in the historical record of the infamous 14th century outbreaks of plague, to be little doubt that, regards the European phases of the pandemic, the origin was in the Crimea, and spread westward by trading ships. Evidently (I don't have any dog in this fight, btw), Rattus rattus, while enormously adaptable to changes in environment, is also somewhat fragile regarding abrupt climate change. This would account for two things: 1) their supplantation by the Norwegian rat, Rattus norvegicus, in most areas where the two have competed directly, and 2) their exceptionally rapid dying off on occasion in newly habituated areas.

After all, what's a flea to do, eh? The host dies, gee, the flea had better go bite something/someone else, right? However, there's a wildcard here, that, afaik, medical science doesn't as yet have a clue concerning. Specifically, even with dying host animals, the several species of fleas do NOT become either aggressive toward or infectious to mammals until and unless one particular gene, the hemin storage gene, ''switches on'' as it were.

Figure this one out, Doc, and the Nobel Prize is ALL yours!

Best regards and a very Happy New Year to you!

(btw...interesting concise discussion of the biological traits of Rattus rattus at: http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu/site/accounts/information/Rattus_rattus.html )

41 posted on 01/04/2005 9:24:51 PM PST by SAJ
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To: SAJ

Thanks, I'll check out the link. After those of us living in Hanta virus territory in the Land of the Flea and Home of the Plague must be careful.


44 posted on 01/04/2005 9:57:36 PM PST by Doctor Stochastic (Vegetabilisch = chaotisch is der Charakter der Modernen. - Friedrich Schlegel)
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