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Bubonic / Pneumonic / Septicemic Plague: Yersinia Pestis

I heard about this, and what I didn't understand was whether the pathogen was still viable after all that time. In other words, can you catch plague off a 5000-year-old body?
 
Only if it bites you.
 
A young Colorado girl's death is a reminder that the plague is still with us and still deadly if not correctly diagnosed and treated as soon as symptoms appear.
Colorado Girl’s Plague Death Is Tragic but Exceedingly Rare

Plague has been found in animals and fleas in six Colorado counties after a 10-year-old girl died in early July from the rare bacterial infection, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment announced.

The unnamed fourth-grader who became infected was a member of the 4-H Weaselskin Club, and had been raising hogs as part of the program. The case marked the state’s first plague death since 2015, and the second confirmed incidence of plague in Colorado this year.

Plague activity has so far been identified in the counties of San Miguel, El Paso, Boulder, Huerfano, Adams, and La Plata ... In May, a squirrel in El Paso County, Colorado tested positive for plague. Two people in the state became infected with plague last year after having close contact with sick animals but survived, according to the Denver Post. Across the U.S., there were five cases of plague in the United States in 2020, with one death. ...
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FULL STORY: https://www.thedailybeast.com/plague-detected-in-6-colorado-counties-after-10-year-old-girls-death
 
WeeScottishLassie said:
The plague has always fascinated me. It's just so grim and bleak.
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“And I, Brother John Clyn, of the Order of Friars Minor and of the convent of Kilkenny, wrote in this book those notable things which happened in my time, which I saw with my own eyes, or which I learned from people worthy of belief. And in case things which should be remembered perish with time and vanish from the memory of those who are to come after us, I, seeing so many evils and the whole world, as it were, placed within the grasp of the evil one, being myself as if among the dead, waiting for death to visit me, have put into writing truthfully all the things that I have heard. And, lest the writing should perish with the writer and the work fail with the labourer, I leave parchments to continue this work, if perchance any man survive and any of the race of Adam escape this pestilence…”

John Clyn added two words to his peroration: magna karistia – ‘great dearth’, then he joined his fellows; another hand briefly added at some later date, ‘Here it seems that the author died.’

https://www.irishcatholic.com/the-dark-shadow-of-the-medieval-black-death/

maximus otter
 
A Wyoming woman is ill with a serious pneumonic plague infection she acquired from her cat(s).
Wyoming woman catches rare pneumonic plague from cats

A woman in Wyoming has been diagnosed with pneumonic plague ...

On Sept. 15, health officials announced that they had detected a "rare but serious" case of plague in a person living in northern Fremont County, Wyoming, which is south of Yellowstone National Park, according to a statement from the Wyoming Department of Health. The person appears to have contracted the disease through "contact with sick pet cats," the statement said. ...

The woman's case marks the seventh human case of plague in Wyoming since 1978 and the first reported case in the state since 2008, the statement said.

The woman's case is particularly unusual because she was infected with pneumonic plague, the rarest and most serious form of the disease. It's also the only form of the disease that can spread from person to person, the CDC says. ...

Cats are "highly susceptible" to plague and are a known source of infections in people, according to the CDC. Cats with pneumonic plague "can pose a significant plague risk to owners, veterinarians and others who handle or come into close contact with these animals due to possible aerosolization of bacteria," the agency said on its website. ...
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FULL STORY: https://www.livescience.com/pneumonic-plague-wyoming-case-cats.html
 
Timor mortis conturbat me...

People might be interested in this late medieval scottish poem - the Lament for the Makaris. I think it has that "feelings of very ordinary people" that you mention @staticgirl

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lament_for_the_Makaris

and the first few verses. Note that the first line means "I who was healthy and happy" and not "I who was in hell" ;)


I that in heill was and gladness
Am trublit now with great sickness
And feblit with infirmitie:
Timor Mortis conturbat me.

Our plesance here is all vain glory,
This fals world is but transitory,
The flesh is bruckle, the Feynd is slee:
Timor Mortis conturbat me.

The state of man does change and vary,
Now sound. now sick, now blyth, now sary,
Now dansand mirry, now like to die:
Timor Mortis conturbat me.
 
A newly published paper argues that we may have underestimated the scope and severity of the first bubonic plague pandemic - the plague of Justinian.
We May Have Underestimated The First Known Outbreak of Bubonic Plague

The Justinianic Plague spread through west Eurasia between the 6th and 8th centuries CE, signifying the first known outbreak of bubonic plague in this part of the world.

According to a new analysis of ancient texts and genetic data, its impact was much more severe than some recent studies have suggested.

Certain scholars think this 'first pandemic' may have killed up to half the population of the Mediterranean region at the time, helping to bring down the Roman Empire.

Meanwhile, other historians argue the consequences were far less significant, and suggest the outbreak might not have had any more impact than the flu does in modern society today.

Which brings us to this latest study. Historian Peter Sarris from the University of Cambridge says historians and archeologists need to work together with geneticists and environmental scientists to fully understand the scope and scale of ancient disease outbreaks – including, in this particular example, the arrival of the bubonic plague. ...

Sarris points to a number of clues that show the devastating impact of the Justinianic Plague, including a flurry of crisis measure legislation passed between the years 542 and 545 CE as the population dropped, followed by a reduction in law making as the pandemic fully took hold. ...

Sarris also highlights the growing amount of DNA evidence showing just how far the bubonic plague spread during this time – all the way to Edix Hill in England, according to a 2018 genetic analysis of a burial site, in one case mentioned in the research.

DNA analysis like this is a much more reliable method of working out where the plague spread to, Sarris says, compared with leafing through ancient texts. It can also shed new light on the routes that the disease took around Europe as it spread.

In this particular case, the disease may have spread to England through the Baltic and Scandinavian countries, arriving there before it hit the Mediterranean – and giving historians a fresh understanding of how this 'first pandemic' evolved. ...
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FULL STORY: https://www.sciencealert.com/we-may-have-underestimated-the-first-known-outbreak-of-bubonic-plague
 
Here are the bibliographic details and abstract of the published paper. The entire paper is accessible at the link below.

Peter Sarris
New Approaches to the ‘Plague of Justinian’
Past & Present, 2021;, gtab024,
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab024

Abstract
This viewpoint is meant as a contribution to debate over the nature and significance of the ‘Justinianic Plague’, which struck Western Eurasia between the sixth and eighth centuries CE, and the methodological challenges posed by attempting to reconcile historical evidence with that derived from the realm of the Natural Sciences. In recent years, major advances have been made in our genetic understanding of the Justinianic Plague. Yet growing scientific interest in the disease has coincided with a concerted effort amongst some historians to seek to downplay its historical importance. This article surveys our current state of historical and scientific understanding with respect to the sixth-century pandemic, responds to the recent attempts to argue that the disease had only a minimal impact on the societies that it struck, and considers how historians should respond to the burgeoning scientific evidence in order to take study of the plague forward. For co-operation between geneticists, environmental scientists, archaeologists and historians, it argues, offers the chance to transform our understanding of how, when and where the plague spread and to assess its impact across the Afro-Eurasian world as a whole, and not just on the Mediterranean, for which we have our best written sources.

SOURCE / FULL PAPER: https://academic.oup.com/past/advance-article/doi/10.1093/pastj/gtab024/6427314
 
Analysis of historical pollen trends suggests the Black Plague didn't uniformly affect all areas of Europe, and some areas were hardly affected at all.
Black Death Mortality Not As Widespread as Long Thought – Bubonic Plague Had No Impact on Parts of Europe

Pollen data from 19 modern European countries reveals that although the Black Death had a devastating impact in some regions, parts of Europe experienced negligible or no impact at all. ...

Although ancient DNA research has identified Yersinia pestis as the Black Death’s causative agent and even traced its evolution across millennia, data on the plague’s demographic impacts is still underexplored and little understood.

Now, a new study in Nature Ecology and Evolution demonstrates that the Black Death’s mortality in Europe was not as universal or as widespread as long thought. An international team of researchers, led by the Palaeo-Science and History group at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, analyzed pollen samples from 261 sites in 19 modern-day European countries to determine how landscapes and agricultural activity changed between 1250 and 1450 CE — roughly 100 years before to 100 years after the pandemic. Their analysis supports the devastation experienced by some European regions, but also shows that the Black Death did not impact all regions equally. ...
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FULL STORY: https://scitechdaily.com/black-deat...onic-plague-had-no-impact-on-parts-of-europe/
PUBLISHED STUDY:
zdebski, A., Guzowski, P., Poniat, R. et al.
Palaeoecological data indicates land-use changes across Europe linked to spatial heterogeneity in mortality during the Black Death pandemic.
Nat Ecol Evol (2022).
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-021-01652-4

FULL REPORT: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-021-01652-4
 
Could a mod please correct the thread title to read 'yersinia' rather than 'yersina'?
Thanks!
 
Newly reported research indicates the Black Death pandemic began in central Asia - perhaps specifically in modern day Kyrgyzstan.
The Most Likely Origin of The Black Death Was Finally Revealed in an Unexpected Place

... The Black Death was the first wave of a 500-year-long pandemic that would go down in history as one of the deadliest of all time. ...

Despite its immense impact, the origins of the disease have long thwarted researchers, who have since traced long-buried ancient genomes of Y. pestis across the continent.

This new study, which suggests the Black Death emerged in Central Eurasia, is actually just the latest in a slew of archeological and paleoecological findings that are steadily rewriting our understanding of the plague. ...

In previous work, which compared ancient genomes from the remains of people who had died of the plague in England, France, Germany and elsewhere, Spyrou and Krause had managed to trace the roots of the second plague pandemic back to a riverside town in Russia.

Other teams have also claimed they uncovered the oldest known plague victim, who died in what is now Latvia from a less transmissible, ancestral strain of Y. pestis thousands of years before the Black Death ripped around the world in the mid-14th century.

But the origins of the second plague pandemic, a grim saga beginning with the Black Death and spanning five centuries, have long been debated and efforts to pinpoint it have thus far been hampered by a prevailing Eurocentric focus, the team says.

Now, their new research pushes the likely origins of the Black Death even farther east into Central Asia, with DNA evidence from the remains of seven individuals exhumed from two cemeteries in modern-day Kyrgyzstan. ...

The cemeteries, located in the Chüy Valley near Lake Issyk-Kul, had actually been excavated between 1885 and 1892, and contained a cluster of burials marked by tombstones inscribed with vague details of an unknown pestilence. ...

To investigate, the team extracted DNA from the teeth of the recovered skeletons, sequenced the genetic material and compared it to modern and historical genomes of Y. pestis. ...

In the teeth of three out of the seven skeletons, they found traces of ancient DNA of the plague bacterium, Y. pestis, and matched these skeletons to their headstones using historic diaries of the original excavations. ...

Two of the reconstructed ancient genomes represented a single strain, dated to the first half of the 14th century. Genomic comparisons suggested this ancestral strain gave rise to a massive expansion of diverse plague strains that branched out and spawned the pandemic. ...
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FULL STORY: https://www.sciencealert.com/ancien...-where-the-black-death-most-likely-originated
 
Here are the bibliographic details and abstract for the published research report. The full report is accessible at the link below.

Spyrou, M.A., Musralina, L., Gnecchi Ruscone, G.A. et al.
The source of the Black Death in fourteenth-century central Eurasia.
Nature (2022).
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04800-3

Abstract
The origin of the medieval Black Death pandemic (AD 1346–1353) has been a topic of continuous investigation because of the pandemic’s extensive demographic impact and long-lasting consequences. Until now, the most debated archaeological evidence potentially associated with the pandemic’s initiation derives from cemeteries located near Lake Issyk-Kul of modern-day Kyrgyzstan. These sites are thought to have housed victims of a fourteenth-century epidemic as tombstone inscriptions directly dated to 1338–1339 state ‘pestilence’ as the cause of death for the buried individuals. Here we report ancient DNA data from seven individuals exhumed from two of these cemeteries, Kara-Djigach and Burana. Our synthesis of archaeological, historical and ancient genomic data shows a clear involvement of the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis in this epidemic event. Two reconstructed ancient Y. pestis genomes represent a single strain and are identified as the most recent common ancestor of a major diversification commonly associated with the pandemic’s emergence, here dated to the first half of the fourteenth century. Comparisons with present-day diversity from Y. pestis reservoirs in the extended Tian Shan region support a local emergence of the recovered ancient strain. Through multiple lines of evidence, our data support an early fourteenth-century source of the second plague pandemic in central Eurasia.

SOURCE / FULL REPORT: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04800-3
 
Herr Cloaca said:
I heard about this, and what I didn't understand was whether the pathogen was still viable after all that time. In other words, can you catch plague off a 5000-year-old body?
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No, you catch it from being bitten by a flea that carries it. 2 of the 3 versions of yersinia pestis exist in the southwest U.S. and there are about 10 to 20 cases a year, usually from the reservation or kids playing in the dump. Bubonic is more common, but Pnuemonic happens sometimes to.

Do you remember the act that made Jay Leno famous on television? He was from the east coast and he went to California and while watching television (this was the 70's) he saw a public service announcement that said "Do not play with a dead animal. If you find a dead animal, tell your parents or an adult. Do not play with a dead animal." It was a real public service announcement. I don't know when they stopped that one, but at the time there were a lot of people hospitalized with yersinia pestis, more than now days.
 
JahaRa said:
It is onlly a plague if most everyone gets it, I don't understand why it is still referred to as "the plague".
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It's how the word was used historically. When it was happening in Europe it had other names like "great pestilence," and "plague" was used in general for extensive disease, frogs, locusts etc. The great pestilence was so significant that it began being called ",the plague" .
 
What saved people from Black Death could cause problems now.

On a drizzly April morning in 2006, a geneticist had the sobering task of helping sort 50 boxes of bones in the Museum of London’s basement into two stacks.

One contained the remains of people who died 700 years ago during the Black Death. In the other were bones from survivors of the plague who had been buried a year or more later in the same medieval cemetery near the Tower of London.

As Jennifer Klunk, then a graduate student at McMaster University, examined the remains, she wondered what made the two groups different. “Why did some people die during the Black Death and others didn’t?” Klunk, now at Daicel Arbor Biosciences, remembers thinking.

Other scholars have been pondering that mystery for centuries. But now, by analyzing DNA from those old bones and others from London and Denmark, Klunk and her colleagues have found an answer: The survivors were much more likely to carry gene variants that boosted their immune response to Yersinia pestis, the flea-borne bacterium that causes the plague. One variant alone appears to have increased the chance of surviving the plague by 40%, they reported today in Nature. “We were blown away. … It’s not a small effect,” says Hendrik Poinar, an evolutionary geneticist at McMaster and co–lead author of the study (and Klunk’s Ph.D. adviser).

The findings also indicate the Black Death caused a dramatic jump in the proportion of people carrying the protective variant; it is the strongest surge of natural selection on the human genome documented so far. But the improved immunity came at a cost: Today, the variant is also associated with higher risk of autoimmune diseases. ...

https://www.science.org/content/article/gene-helped-people-survive-black-death-come-haunt
 
ramonmercado said:
What saved people from Black Death could cause problems now.

On a drizzly April morning in 2006, a geneticist had the sobering task of helping sort 50 boxes of bones in the Museum of London’s basement into two stacks.

One contained the remains of people who died 700 years ago during the Black Death. In the other were bones from survivors of the plague who had been buried a year or more later in the same medieval cemetery near the Tower of London.

As Jennifer Klunk, then a graduate student at McMaster University, examined the remains, she wondered what made the two groups different. “Why did some people die during the Black Death and others didn’t?” Klunk, now at Daicel Arbor Biosciences, remembers thinking.

Other scholars have been pondering that mystery for centuries. But now, by analyzing DNA from those old bones and others from London and Denmark, Klunk and her colleagues have found an answer: The survivors were much more likely to carry gene variants that boosted their immune response to Yersinia pestis, the flea-borne bacterium that causes the plague. One variant alone appears to have increased the chance of surviving the plague by 40%, they reported today in Nature. “We were blown away. … It’s not a small effect,” says Hendrik Poinar, an evolutionary geneticist at McMaster and co–lead author of the study (and Klunk’s Ph.D. adviser).

The findings also indicate the Black Death caused a dramatic jump in the proportion of people carrying the protective variant; it is the strongest surge of natural selection on the human genome documented so far. But the improved immunity came at a cost: Today, the variant is also associated with higher risk of autoimmune diseases. ...

https://www.science.org/content/article/gene-helped-people-survive-black-death-come-haunt
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Great News!
My ancestors survived the plague in order to condemn me to a lifetime of the “joys” of Crohn’s disease. I’ll ponder this when attached to the Kharzi throughout today.

BUBONIC PLAGUE AND AUTOIMMUNE DISORDERS​

Scientists discovered that the very genes that helped medieval people survive the plague contribute to a host of other conditions today. These ailments include lupus, Crohn’s disease, and rheumatoid arthritis. All of these diseases share something in common: they are autoimmune conditions caused by the immune system attacking itself.

Hendrik Poinar, an anthropology professor at McMaster, puts it this way: “A hyperactive immune system may have been great in the past but in the environment today it might not be as helpful.” That’s an understatement.

https://www.ripleys.com/weird-news/how-the-black-death-is-still-affecting-our-immune-systems/
 
Were the rats innocent? Maybe not fully guilty (but not as innocent as the cats).

The Black Death ravaged Europe between 1347 and 1353, killing millions. Plague outbreaks in Europe then continued until the 19th century.

One of the most commonly recited facts about plague in Europe was that it was spread by rats. In some parts of the world, the bacterium that causes plague, Yersinia pestis, maintains a long-term presence in wild rodents and their fleas. This is called an animal "reservoir".

While plague begins in rodents, it sometimes spills over to humans. Europe may have once hosted animal reservoirs that sparked plague pandemics. But plague could have also been repeatedly reintroduced from Asia. Which of these scenarios was present remains a topic of scientific controversy.

Our recent research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), has shown that environmental conditions in Europe would have prevented plague from surviving in persistent, long-term animal reservoirs. How, then, did plague persevere in Europe for so long?

Our study offers two possibilities. One, the plague was being reintroduced from Asian reservoirs. Second, there could have been short- or medium-term temporary reservoirs in Europe. In addition, the two scenarios might have been mutually supportive.

However, the rapid spread of the Black Death and subsequent outbreaks of the next few centuries also suggest slow-moving rats may not have played the critical role in transmitting the disease that is often portrayed.

European climate​

To work out whether plague could survive in long-term animal reservoirs in Europe, we examined factors such as soil characteristics, climatic conditions, terrain types and rodent varieties. These all seem to affect whether plague can hold on in reservoirs.

For example, high concentrations of some elements in soil, including copper, iron, magnesium, as well as a high soil pH (whether it is acidic or alkaline), cooler temperatures, higher altitudes and lower rainfall appear to favor the development of persistent reservoirs, though it is not entirely clear why, at this stage.

Based on our comparative analysis, centuries-long wild rodent plague reservoirs were even less likely to have existed from the Black Death of 1348 to the early 19th century than today, when comprehensive research rules out any such reservoirs within Europe.

https://www.sciencealert.com/we-might-have-been-wrong-about-the-role-rats-played-in-the-black-death
 
Tempest63 said:
Great News!
My ancestors survived the plague in order to condemn me to a lifetime of the “joys” of Crohn’s disease. I’ll ponder this when attached to the Kharzi throughout today.

BUBONIC PLAGUE AND AUTOIMMUNE DISORDERS​

Scientists discovered that the very genes that helped medieval people survive the plague contribute to a host of other conditions today. These ailments include lupus, Crohn’s disease, and rheumatoid arthritis. All of these diseases share something in common: they are autoimmune conditions caused by the immune system attacking itself.

Hendrik Poinar, an anthropology professor at McMaster, puts it this way: “A hyperactive immune system may have been great in the past but in the environment today it might not be as helpful.” That’s an understatement.

https://www.ripleys.com/weird-news/how-the-black-death-is-still-affecting-our-immune-systems/
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To be fair though, most of our ancestors must have survived the plague, otherwise we wouldn't be here. And we don't all have auto immune disease, so how does that work?
 
catseye said:
To be fair though, most of our ancestors must have survived the plague, otherwise we wouldn't be here. And we don't all have auto immune disease, so how does that work?
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I know my Crohn’s was passed to me and my sister from my mother. DNA shows mum had the same probability of having the disease as me but she never had the actual disease. My brother never had the disease yet one of his grandchildren has been struck down with it, so big bruv was likely a carrier. So whilst not everyone has an autoimmune disorder, many could carry the gene.

The link takes you to a site where the autoimmune (or suspected autoimmune conditions) are listed. I would hazard a guess that most family bloodlines will have something out of the list, even if it is one of the most common such as arthritis.

https://www.autoimmuneinstitute.org/resources/autoimmune-disease-list/
 
Tempest63 said:
I know my Crohn’s was passed to me and my sister from my mother. DNA shows mum had the same probability of having the disease as me but she never had the actual disease. My brother never had the disease yet one of his grandchildren has been struck down with it, so big bruv was likely a carrier. So whilst not everyone has an autoimmune disorder, many could carry the gene.

The link takes you to a site where the autoimmune (or suspected autoimmune conditions) are listed. I would hazard a guess that most family bloodlines will have something out of the list, even if it is one of the most common such as arthritis.

https://www.autoimmuneinstitute.org/resources/autoimmune-disease-list/
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That's true, I didn't think about carriers as opposed to sufferers. An entire family could be carrying an auto immune gene without any members actually having the condition.


Although I think arthritis was fairly common even before the great plague. I know some Bronze Age skeletons show signs of it.
 
catseye said:
That's true, I didn't think about carriers as opposed to sufferers. An entire family could be carrying an auto immune gene without any members actually having the condition.


Although I think arthritis was fairly common even before the great plague. I know some Bronze Age skeletons show signs of it.
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The autoimmune arthritis mentioned is rheumatoid arthritis. Osteoarthritis made by the ends of the bones just wearing away is a mechanical process. I suspect that archaeologists see osteoarthritis, because rheumatoid may not leave any effect on the bones - or will at least look very diffeent.
 
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