[SCI] Black Death caused by 'ebola' virus, not rats

[Sassyone]

Black Death caused by 'ebola' virus, not rats
By Robert Uhlig, Technology Correspondent
(Filed: 22/11/2001)


THE Black Death was not caused by rats passing bubonic plague bacteria but by an ebola-like virus transmitted from person to person, British scientists said yesterday.

A study at Liverpool University suggests the disease that first appeared in Europe in 1347 and spread like wildfire for 300 years did not need insanitary conditions and could strike again at any time.

Prof Christopher Duncan, who led the study with Dr Susan Scott, said: "Intuitively, the Black Death has all the hallmarks of a viral disease. The history books are wrong."

Only one Black Death symptom, swollen glands in the armpit or groin, accords with bubonic plague. Other symptoms made bubonic plague a very unlikely cause.

http://www.portal.telegraph.co.uk/n...ag22.xml&sSheet=/news/2001/11/22/ixhomef.html

 

[yourdon]

Well, this is interesting -- but whatever happened in 1347 probably doesn't have a lot of impact on our lives today. On the other hand, you might want to pick up a copy of The Great Taos Bank Robbery, and other Indian Country Affairs, by Tony Hillerman (ISBN 0-8263-0530-X, presumably available through Amazon).

It turns out not to be fiction, but a collection of fascinating essays, vignettes, and recountings of the history of this area of New Mexico -- including a chapter entitled "We All Fall Down" about the 1961 outbreak of plague in the Pecos wilderness area near Santa Fe. The detective work involved in tracking it down was fascinating; only a few people died, and the problem was eventually contained.

The scary thing is that all of this is very recent, and there is a possibilty of reoccurrence. To quote from the chapter, "Bubonic plague was first detected in New Mexico in 1938 when it caused a die-off of prairie rodents. The first human case went into the records in 1949, quickly followed by four others."

At the end of the chapter, after the 1961 outbreak had been tracked and contained, Mr. Hillerman concludes with the following (pp. 39-40):

"When summer came again, the plague seemed to have vanished from the Sangre de Cristo Mountains as mysteriously as it had come. The New England Journal of Medicine published a technical report on the 1961 outbreak, reporting that bacilli of the Black Death had been found in fifteen western states and reminding physicians that bubonic plague 'is still present, still as virulent as ever, and a threat with grave implications if it bursts its bounds.' The year passed quietly, but when 1963 came a Navajo shepherd shot a rabbit in Arizona, and fed it to his sheep dogs, and died five days later of bubonic plague in a hospital at Gallup -- two hundred miles west of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. In Colorado, 'Pausuerella pestis' was found in animals on a Lowry Field bombing range. In New Mexico, and throughout the West, [research scientist] Miller and men of his profession watched the old plague foci and hunted new ones, knowing it will continue its odd cycle of killing until science finally finds a way to erase it from the countryside.

"And in the schoolyard at Pecos, and elsewhere where the younger children play the older games, the voices at recess still sing 'Ring Around the Rosy" almost as the children sang it in the Middle Ages, when the game was new.

"The words in the fourteenth century were only a little different:

Ring around the roses,
Pocket full of posies,
Ka-Choo! Ka-Choo!
We all fall down.

"Today the children do not know that a ring of rosemary blossoms and a pocket full of the aromatic petals was another of the desperate, hopeless prescriptions for warding off the Black Death. Now they substitute the words 'Ashes, Ashes' for the bloody cough of pneumonic plague in the third line, and the macabre cynicism is missing when they sing 'We all fall down.'

"But the Black Death is still in the mountains."

 

[Brooks]

I'd recommend Armies of Pestilence by RS Bray.

Bray goes into the history and theories about half a dozen major epidemic diseases and how they MAY have influenced history over time.

There is certainly a great deal of controversy about the nature of most of the epidemics through the first several centures A.D. Occasionally there would be a very (medically) accurate account of the symptoms that would help nail the likelihood of what the disease really was. Much of the skepticism about the earliest accounts is whether certain diseases were really around during those times. Malaria is credited as being with "man" ever since the earliest evolutionary cutoffs, but most of the other diseases are apparently quite recent. There is also the possibility that some nasty diseases of those days no longer exist, or exist in a totally different form.

Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel also makes a convincing point that the epidemic diseases weren't going to give rise until certain population thresholds were met.

At any rate, I take this new study with a fair amount of skepticism. The three forms of plague are, I thought, quite well understood. There IS a pneumonic version of plague that is caused by the same pathogen, and we know that it is not spread by fleas (e.g., by indirectly by rats). The alternative, to me, is that what we ascribed by Bubonic, and then pneumonic plague, was a different disease altogether. I'm not ready to accept that pneumonic plague is ebola.

The comment, "Intuitively, the Black Death has all the hallmarks of a viral disease. The history books are wrong." to me is B.S. Pneumonic plague is very easily spread by human contact and has nothing to do with sanitary conditions, but potentially quite a bit to do with overcrowding, which itself can be a result of disease.