I thought it was the fleas on the rats that spread the disease?
BINGO... Fleas it is.. The plague sometimes shows up in the American west.. the fleas on prairie dogs, I think.?
I thought it was the fleas on the rats that spread the disease?
That has always been the general consensus. Fleas don’t need rats to be their hosts. Few if any of the flees that have bitten me jumped off a rat. My guess is that people in the middle ages were likely better at catching and killing rats than their modern counterparts, but that they didn’t have as many options when it came to poisons that used to be available to consumers these days.
Has anyone here tried the latest available rodent “poisons”? They are basically worthless. They seem to be based on the principal that the rodent will eat so much of it that it will get a bad tummy ache and leave. The active ingredient is now “Cholecalciferol which uses NO anti-coagulants or neurotoxins.” If you have a stash of the original D-con... it is now worth quite a lot. If the rats currently invading your domicile have fleas that are carrying the plague you had best look for someone who can get ahold of more lethal options.
Of course, I doubt whether any of the fleas which have munched on me over the years came from a rat. Most came from Fido or Fluffy or jumped on me from grass or bushes as they were waiting for some warm-blooded animal to come along.
And fleas live on far more animals than rats.
The two different styles of death (both back in thec1350 and 1918-1919 epidemics ) are “strangely” with the rapid deaths of Covid 19 and the slower flu-and-congestive failures and treatments.