Posted on 01/11/2006 1:33:43 PM PST by blam
Actually, the Black Plague (and other terrible infectious plagues) are carried by FLEAS, by the INSECT, the flea.
They are hosts to a parasitic process that lives in their guts and when they bite an animal, they infect the animal. Given the high population of fleas on rodents, then rodents scramble around human habitats and then pass it on.
But, the Black Plague actually originated in Northern and Central Asia, where it was transmitted in the guts of fleas on camels in the import trade from Asia to Europe. And, of course, to rodents after the fleas arrived on the camels, and then to humans in Europe (and eventualy elsewhere).
The hapless rodents simply get to be the method of transmission.
Yes, so I've also read and imagined, particularly after viewing the petrified trees and tree trunks...very large, substantial trees toppled over and petrified where they lay, without the ability to even decay, indicating severe and extreme drought conditions occuring relatively quickly.
Must'a been horrific to experience. Also global, from what I've read as to similar terrible conditions affecting the Mediterranean.
I did read as to what's been determined to have caused the global drought (that's inherent to this article about Mexico's experience of it), but now can't recall. I THINK it is attributed to the wobble of the Earth's orbit around the Sun but can't be certain (memory is foggy about this). There's always the "increased volcanic activity" that causes global atmospheric occlusion and thus, limits what sunlight reaches the planet's surface, then affecting everything else...since the drought was worse on the shared longitude, it seems to indicate, actually, both.
Tangentially...of interest here...the area that was populated at it's height of civilization by the Egyptians was sent into permanent drought (remains so) due to the fact that the Himalayas rose up as a high range during the many centuries of the Egyptians -- and the rising mountain range to their East changed the atmospheric moisture flow on the planet.
Don't these things become endemic over time? I can't say I haven't done a lot of reading on Mexico, but the plague lasted for about 300 years in England, reappearing periodically.
It's easy to see how they do become endemic. And despite that, still no immunity by those who are "local" to the worst of these bugs.
My perspective as to bacteria and viruses in general is that they're all here with us all the time, in that we're all present on the planet simulataneously. It's just a case of when what infects the species and once that occurs, others become infected, also. Containment is nearly impossible with larger populations and certainly with mobile ones.
Like the Black Plague...the "mobility" in place by the trade routes allowed the bug to proliferate among humans outside isolated areas in Asia. And look what happened.
The thing that puzzles me is that if it was an exotic plague, why haven't we seen an outbreak in localized areas like Lassa fever?
Ah! Very interesting and a real bummer. I need a good chunk of cooked beef occasionally.
Well, conditions (all), whatever they are, have to be met inorder for the agent/cause to emerge. You can never tell about these things...sometimes one particularly virulent bacteria can be living amidst one or two populations of insects and their combined populations eventually overtake the other animals' that they prey upon. Perhaps one of the two (or whatever, as an example of changing conditions here) became extinct or is in small population numbers or even hibernate for ten, twenty year cycles due to moisture, sunlight changes, food source, whatever, and, once reduced, can't affect the entire population to the extent that they overtake as to infections their prey/host species'...
A lot of species are not large in populations in any one area globally...from all varieties of life, animal, plant and insect. It's a case of whatever conditions and crowding is required for whatever the bug is or bugs are inorder to proliferate to some intense load that then affects other, larger populations.
Or, it can also have to do with access. Like what populations access what areas for what purpose and interact with what when they do. If some bacterial lives in some deep underground cave and it's only visited once every century, and even then the visitors are not in contact with that bacteria except perhaps on only one occasion, then the aren't infected and don't infect others when they complete their occasional cave visit.
There still are such limited populations in areas that it's surprising...like albino insects found only in one small area on the planet or the brine shrimp remaining from long, long ago when areas of the Southwest and West were under an ocean but are now dry desert.
The bubonic plague outbreak that occured in Colorado and New Mexico a short while ago was found to have started with one fellow who had crawled underneath his house in Colorado to try to retrieve a stranded housecat, and he breathed in some dust that had laid there for a long, long time undisturbed (old rodent droppings in the dust) and became infected quite by random that way. The cat wasn't infected so perhaps it took the guy being face down or cheek down in the dust breathing heavily for a while as he labored there trying to get the cat, inorder to become infected. The cat, sitting above the dirt, wasn't.
But then that guy infected a few others and it soon began appearing in children in New Mexico who were out playing routinely in the dry fields, running around in heavy breathing repeatedly like children at play do.
Same thing with other infectious diseases. It takes a combination of all the necessary things all at once inorder to become infected.
Except with a few horrid airborne bugs that infect nearly any and all who merely breathe in, as with the worst of the hemorraghics. And then bodily fluid contact as with HIV.
But with the plague, "it" was just lying all around the environment for who knows how long and it took an extra dry spell that produced more dust than usual to then be stirred up by heavily breathing humans who got their noses right up next to the dust inorder to become infected this last outbreak (of the plague).
another source of data may have been tax records. I have no specific information on Spanish taxing practices, but after 1066, William the Conqueror commissioned the Doomsday Book, which recorded every person in the conquered area of England, and their property.
Deat and taxes, death and taxes....
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Well, in Houston it certainly has.
I can't turn around without being robbed or assaulted by one of 'em!
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hanta virus is an old plague in the Americas and Asia. It kills off the young, healthy adults leaving behind the oldsters and children.
Hanta virus, however, can kill millions of people in short order and leave civilizations destroyed in its wake.
“Tree-ring evidence, allowing reconstructions of the levels precipitation, indicate that the worst drought to afflict North America in the past 500 years also occurred in the mid-16th century, when severe drought extended at times from Mexico to the boreal forest and from the Pacific to Atlantic coasts.”
That must be a lie!!! There were no gus-gussling CO2 belching SUVs criss-crossing the moutains, plans, valleys or rivers of North American and Mexico at the time!!!; ergo - impossible for such a drouhgt to occur, such things ONLY can happen when human’s cause them to!!!!!! LOL
The tree record now extends back about 10,000 years in the past. They have detected some serious worldwide events in our past.
I was expresssing a bit of sarcasm and forget to my /sarc label at the end
OF COURSE extreme weather changes have occurred, naturally, in the past
humans do not usually stop and realize that in terms of “earth history” their personal experience is infintessimally small and all of human history not a great deal greater
Mike Baillie is Professor of Palaeoecology at Queens University, Belfast, Northern Ireland. He is an authority on tree rings and their use in dating ancient events (every year, a tree adds a "ring" to its trunk as it grows - good years are represented by thick rings while bad years are represented by thin rings). He conducted a complete (and continuous) review of annual global tree growth patterns over the last 5,000 years and found that there were five major environmental shocks that were witnessed worldwide. These shocks were reflected in the ring widths being very thin. Wanting to know more, he turned to human historical records, and found that the years in question (between 2354 and 2345 BC, 1628 and 1623 BC, 1159 and 1141 BC, 208 and 204 BC, and AD 536 and 545) all corresponded with "dark ages" in civilisation
Interesting article, thanks for posting.
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