[Gladwin]

Evolution in action

[Gladwin]

I am a little curious what they think could be the Black Death, if it wasn't bubonic plague.

It is too bad that they couldn't sample dead bodies from that time period for bacterial genetic material. I don't know if that is even possible.

[mewzilla]

...not the modern disease known as the bubonic plague...

Uh, duh. It could have been a different strain of the bubonic plague. It could have included a bunch of different diseases that were lumped in with bubonic plague. I hope these folks have got an infectious disease specialist or two on their team.

[SpringheelJack]

This article was posted a few days ago, and anyway, I think it's bunk. As though rats couldn't find a way to get across rivers. These scientists need to take a trip into the real world.

[KarlInOhio]

"You know, medicine is not an exact science, but we are learning all the time. Why, just fifty years ago they thought a disease like your daughter's was caused by demonic possession or witchcraft. But nowadays, we know that Isabelle is suffering from an imbalance of bodily humors, perhaps caused by a toad or a small dwarf living in her stomach."
--Theodoric of York

[firebrand]

Once people are infected, they infect other people very rapidly. So all the stuff about barriers to rats would only apply to the earliest stage of the plague. When it hit heavily populated areas, it became a person-to-person disease.

[humbletheFiend]

Whatever it was, it sure killed a lot of people and actually resulted in a significant reduction in the supply of able-bodied workers. The surviving peasants shamelessly exploited that dislocation by demanding and receiving a totally unjustifiable improvement in their standard of living at the direct expense of their employers.

[scholar]

Modern bubonic plague typically needs to reach a high frequency in the rat population before it spills over into the human community via the flea vector.

Here in the US bubonic plague is endemic in the West due to prairie dog populations and their flea vectors. Don't these so-called scientists have anything better to do with our tax dollars than to spend their time trying to debunk accepted science.

[BMCDA]

Ping to all y'all.

[xJones]

However it was caused, that was one effective little bugger.

[BluH2o]

“The symptoms of the Black Death included high fevers, fetid breath, coughing, vomiting of blood and foul body odor,”

Foul body odor in that era was pretty much the norm ... as was fetid breath (bad teeth).
So how could you tell?
I assume they're talking about degree ... more odoriferous and fetid than usual.:o[

[Digger]

Keep letting these DemocRATS muliply & you will see the same, however the mind goes first.

[Dog Gone]

Why shouldn't new diseases appear? Microorganisms tend to reproduce extremely rapidly, and genetic mutations should tend to occur more rapidly than in larger organisms.

Black Death could have been a variation of something which currently exists, or it could have been something which died out along with susceptible hosts. It was a nasty little bugger, though.

[randog]

“The symptoms of the Black Death included high fevers, fetid breath, coughing, vomiting of blood and foul body odor,”...

They all died of really, really bad hangovers.

[Jimmy Valentine]

Medical diagnosis that came down from that era:

"Ring around the rosy,

Pocket full of posies

Ashes, ashes,

We all fall down".

Regards,

[Utopia]

An analysis of the priests’ monthly mortality rates during the epidemic shows a 45-fold greater risk of death than during normal times, a level of mortality far higher than usually associated with bubonic plague.

This has got to be one of the most stupidest things I've read on this topic in a long, long time.
The Priests were the ones who administered the last rights. Their rate of exposure would be higher than any one else. ...

It was the Black Death that swept through Europe in 1347. It had many stages. The most virulent form was the Pneumonic Plague