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Black Death, pandemic that ravaged Europe between 1347 and 1351, taking a proportionately greater toll of life than any other known epidemic or war up to that time. stis, the bacterium that causes plague. The Black Death is widely believed to have been the result of plague, caused by infection with the bacterium Yersinia pestis. Modern genetic analyses indicate that the strain of Y. pestis introduced during the Black Death is ancestral to all extant circulating Y. pestis strains known to cause disease in humans. Hence, the origin of modern plague epidemics lies in the medieval period. Other scientific evidence...

Scientists may have uncovered what is the largest mass burial site in Europe. The site in Nuremberg, Germany, contains the bodies of at least 1,000 people who died of the bubonic plague, which killed up to 60 per cent of Europe's population. Described as a 'nationally significant' discovery, experts think the bodies were buried at the first half of 17th century following a ruthless wave of the disease. The bubonic plague is spread by the bite of a flea that's been infected with a bacterium called Yersinia pestis. Those afflicted died quickly and horribly following a bout of high fever,...

Los Angeles isn’t the city of angels: it’s the city of rats. Last year, LA shot up in the rankings of the “rattiest cities” from third to second place, and it’s closing in fast on Chicago. What is its secret? There is the fetid filth of the junkie vagrant camps where typhus, a medieval disease spread by rats, made a comeback almost as fast as crime once city officials legalized the ‘homeless’ trifecta of street living, drug use and shoplifting. And like criminals and junkies, the rats have Democrats on their side. In the fall of last year, Gov. Newsom...

The Black Death’s reign of terror lasted for more than 400 years. By culling up to 50% of the population of Europe, the Great Plague guaranteed its place in the history books. Yet while accounts of the Black Death have focused graphically on those who died, the stories of those who survived have gone untold. Until now. The Riddle of the Plague Survivors focuses on those who walked away unaffected. Could this village be the first example of quarantining to avoid disease? How could anyone survive in the face of what is described as one of the most pathogenic bacterial...

The bubonic plague killed so many people in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa that that natural selection event is still rippling through our genomes today. But the same genes that helped your ancestors survive the Black Death may be contributing to autoimmune disease today.Have an Autoimmune Disease? Blame the Black Death | 7:16SciShow | 7.77M subscribers | 572,860 views | November 7, 2023

There are few events in human history as ominous — both in name and impact — as the Black Death. The bubonic plague pandemic made its way across Eurasia and north Africa between 1346 and 1553. It's estimated to have killed up to 200 million people, or 60 per cent of the Earth's entire population at the time. Now, scientists believe they have pinpointed the origin of the Black Death to a region of present day Kyrgyzstan called Issyk-Kul, once a stopover on the Silk Road trade route in the 14th century. Its place of origin has been one of...

When the bubonic plague arrived in London in 1348, the disease devastated the city. So many people died, so quickly, that the city's cemeteries filled up. "So the king [Edward III], at the time, bought this piece of land and started digging it," says geneticist Luis Barreiro at the University of Chicago. This cemetery, called East Smithfield, became a mass grave, where more than 700 people were buried together. "There's basically layers and layers of bodies one on top of each other," he says. The city shut down the cemetery when the outbreak ended. In the end, this bubonic plague,...

JENA, GERMANY—Phys.org reports that a study of genetic material recovered from the teeth of people buried in the Hagios Charalambos cave on the Greek island of Crete between about 2290 and 1909 B.C. detected the presence of extinct strains of two pathogens. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, the British School at Athens, and Temple University suggest that epidemics brought about by Y. pestis, which causes plague, and S. enterica, which causes typhoid fever, could have contributed to the collapse of Egypt’s Old Kingdom and the Akkadian...

A Silk Road stopover might have been the epicentre of one of humanity’s most destructive pandemics. People who died in a fourteenth-century outbreak in what is now Kyrgyzstan were killed by strains of the plague-causing bacterium Yersinia pestis that gave rise to the pathogens responsible several years later for the Black Death, shows a study of ancient genomes. “It is like finding the place where all the strains come together, like with coronavirus where we have Alpha, Delta, Omicron all coming from this strain in Wuhan,” says Johannes Krause, a palaeogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in...

A deadly pandemic with mysterious origins: It might sound like a modern headline, but scientists have spent centuries debating the source of the Black Death that devastated the medieval world. Not anymore, according to researchers who say they have pinpointed the source of the plague to a region of Kyrgyzstan, after analyzing DNA from remains at an ancient burial site. "We managed to actually put to rest all those centuries-old controversies about the origins of the Black Death," said Philip Slavin, a historian and part of the team whose work was published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The Black Death...

The Black Death was a devastating global epidemic of bubonic plague that struck Europe and Asia in the mid-1300s. The plague arrived in Europe in October 1347, when 12 ships from the Black Sea docked at the Sicilian port of Messina. People gathered on the docks were met with a horrifying surprise: Most sailors aboard the ships were dead, and those still alive were gravely ill and covered in black boils that oozed blood and pus. Sicilian authorities hastily ordered the fleet of “death ships” out of the harbor, but it was too late: Over the next five years, the...

It's a simple rule-of-thumb to follow when you have a rat problem, according to Corrigan, who has a Ph.D. in urban rats studies and advises cities, including the District. “The rats do not like to chew into bleach tasting anything,” he says. “If the outside of the can smells like bleach to that famous nose of theirs, they're like, 'Well, this ain't food.’”

...bubonic plague may have reached England before its first recorded case in the Mediterranean via a currently unknown route, possibly involving the Baltic and Scandinavia...The Justinianic Plague is the first known outbreak of bubonic plague in west Eurasian history and struck the Mediterranean world at a pivotal moment in its historical development, when the Emperor Justinian was trying to restore Roman imperial power.For decades, historians have argued about the lethality of the disease; its social and economic impact; and the routes by which it spread. In 2019-20, several studies, widely publicised in the media, argued that historians had massively exaggerated...

Having killed as many as 200 million people in Europe, Asia, and North Africa, the Black Death began to lift in the years 1348–49. Europe had lost between a third and half of its people. In many cases, entire villages stood empty, having lost their entire population.The Black Death changed life forever in Western Europe. With so few inhabitants, the value of labor exploded, and wages shot up. For those who survived, the following half-century was a period of affluence and technological development, with increasing productivity and advances in printing, weaponry, navigation, and manufacturing. The optimism of the late 14th...

An outbreak of bubonic plague has left victims vomiting blood as health authorities revel at least 11 people as young as 30 have died over two weeks with many vomiting blood At least 11 people have died in an outbreak of the Black Death in the Democratic Republic of Congo, reports say. People are being urged to wear masks and staying away from corpses amid the surge in the deadly disease which caused the most fatal pandemic in history. Near-daily deaths with at least 15 cases of the bubonic plague have been recorded in Ituri province's health department, the Express...

The Black Death, often called the largest pandemic in human history, is conventionally defined as the massive plague outbreak of 1346 to 1353 C.E. that struck the Black Sea and Mediterranean, extended into the Middle East, North Africa, and western Europe, and killed as much as half the total population of those regions. Yet genetic approaches to plague’s history have established that Yersinia pestis, the causative organism of plague, suddenly diverged in Central Asia at some point before the Black Death, splitting into four new branches—a divergence geneticists have called the “Big Bang.” Drawing on a “biological archive” of genetic...

Part I An Introduction Overview of the Renaissance Never in history has one man’s thesis so rattled the powers that be, than did Martin Luther’s ninety-five grievances he nailed to the Church door at Wittenberg. It was an act of defiance that would eventually topple a church state organization that held sway over kings and paupers alike for a thousand years. Every history class that covers the reformation will tell you that it was Johann Tetzel’sselling of indulgences that pushed Luther into action that day, Tetzel’s action was only the final straw, not the cause of the revolution. At the...

In the Middle Ages, the plague caused tens of millions of deaths in Europe in a series of outbreaks known as the Black Death. And while it's extremely rare in modern times, the deadly bacterial infection is still around today — but how likely are you to catch it? This week, California reported its first case of plague in five years. The patient, a resident of the South Lake Tahoe area, is said to be recovering at home. And in July, a 15-year-old boy in western Mongolia died of bubonic plague that he contracted from an infected marmot. According to...

Who Is Saint Rocco? Saint Rocco was born of noble parentage about 1340 A.D. in Montpellier, France. At birth it was noted that he had a red cross-shaped birthmark on the left side of his chest. As a young child, San Rocco showed great devotion to God and the Blessed mother. At an early age, his parents died leaving him an orphan under the care of his uncle, the Duke of Montpellier. Soon after, San Rocco distributed his wealth among the poor and took a vow of poverty. San Rocco dressed in the clothes of a pilgrim and departed...

First coronavirus, then murder hornets, now bubonic plague?! Authorities in China have responded to one confirmed case of the black death and another suspected case. Both cases emerged in the semi-autonomous region of Inner Mongolia. According to Chinese Communist Party reports, a herdsman in Bayannur contracted bubonic plague and is in quarantine and in stable condition, the BBC reported. Officials also said they were investigating a second case.That case involves a 15-year-old patient who came down with a fever after close contact with a marmot hunted by a dog. #Mongolia discovered another suspected patient infected with the bubonic plague. The...