Bubonic Plague Traced To Ancient Egypt (Black Death)

National Geographic News ^ | 3-10-2004 | Cameron Walker

[blam]

Bubonic Plague Traced to Ancient Egypt

Cameron Walker
for National Geographic News
March 10, 2004

The bubonic plague, or Black Death, may have originated in ancient Egypt, according to a new study. "This is the first time the plague's origins in Egypt have been backed up by archaeological evidence," said Eva Panagiotakopulu, who made the discovery. Panagiotakopulu is an archaeologist and fossil-insect expert at the University of Sheffield, England.

King Tutankhamun lies in his burial chamber in the Valley of the Kings, Egypt. Some researchers now believe that the bubonic plague, or Black Death, originated in the village where builders of Tutankhamun's tomb lived.

Photograph by Victor R. Boswell, Jr., copyright National Geographic Society

While most researchers consider central Asia as the birthplace of the deadly epidemic, the new study—published recently in the Journal of Biogeography—suggests an alternate starting point.

"It's usually thought that the plague entered from the East," said B. Joseph Hinnebusch, a microbiologist at Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana. The new study suggests that North Africa could also be the source of the epidemic, he said.

The bacteria-caused plague is more than a grim historical footnote today. The African island of Madagascar experienced outbreaks in the late 1990s, and some worry about the plague's potential use as an agent of bioterrorism.

Information about past epidemics could help scientists predict where new outbreaks would occur and better understand how the disease spreads, Hinnebusch said.

Plague in Europe

The most famous plague outbreak swept through Europe in the 1300s. Dubbed the Black Death, the disease killed more than 25 million people—one-fourth of the continent's population. The nursery rhyme "Ring Around the Rosy" is traced to the plague's rose-colored lesions and deadly spread.

Earlier outbreaks also decimated Europe. The Justinian Plague claimed as many as a hundred million lives in the Byzantine Empire during the sixth century A.D.

The bacterium that causes bubonic plague, Yersinia pestis, lives inside the gut of its main carrier, the flea. The plague likely spread to Europe on the backs of shipboard black rats that carried plague-infested fleas.

"It's the plague's unholy trinity," said Michael Antolin, a biologist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, who studies bubonic plague in black-tailed prairie dogs.

Inside the flea, bacteria multiply and block off the flea's throat-like area. The flea gets increasingly hungry. When it bites—whether rat or human—it spits some bacteria out into the bite wound.

People can contract several forms of the plague. The main form, bubonic, often starts out with fever, chills, and enlarged lymph nodes. But if the bacteria make their way into the lungs, a deadlier form, called pneumonic plague, can be spread from person to person. Pneumonic plague occurs in about 5 percent of those infected with bubonic plague.

Several researchers have suggested that Europe's Black Death spread too fast and killed too many to be attributed to bubonic plague. But plague experts Hinnebusch and Antolin said that the pneumonic plague form could have been responsible for the quick-spreading epidemic.

"If you inhale it, you're pretty much dead," Antolin said.

Pharaohs' Plague

Panagiotakopulu came upon clues to the plague's presence in ancient Egypt by accident. She had been looking at fossil insect remains to learn about daily life more than 3,000 years ago.

"People lived close to their domestic animals and to the pests that infected their household," Panagiotakopulu said. "I just started looking at what diseases people might have, what diseases their pigs might have, and what diseases might have been passed from other animals to humans."

The researcher used a fine sieve to strain out remains of insects and small mammals from several sites. Panagiotakopulu, who is conducting similar work on Viking ruins in Greenland, said that looking at insects is a key way to reconstruct the past. "I can learn about how people lived by looking in their homes and at what was living with and on them," she said.

In Egypt Panagiotakopulu combed the workers'-village site in Amarna, where the builders of the tombs of Egyptian kings Tutankhamun and Akhenaton lived. There, the researcher unearthed cat and human fleas—known to be plague carriers in some cases—in and around the workers' homes. That find spurred Panagiotakopulu to believe that the bubonic plague's fleaborne bacteria could also have been lurking in the area, so she went in search of other clues.

Previous excavations along the Nile Delta had turned up Nile rats, an endemic species, dating to the 16th and 17th century B.C. The plague's main carrier flea is thought to be native to the Nile Valley and is known to be a Nile rat parasite.

According to Panagiotakopulu, the Nile provided an ideal spot for rats to carry the plague into urban communities. Around 3500 B.C., people began to build cities next to the Nile. During floods, the habitat of the Nile rat was disturbed, sending the rodent—and its flea and bacterial hitchhikers—into the human domain.

Egyptian writings from a similar time period point to an epidemic disease with symptoms similar to the plague. A 1500 B.C. medical text known as the Ebers Papyrus identifies a disease that "has produced a bubo, and the pus has petrified, the disease has hit."

It's possible that trade spread the disease to black rats, which then carried the bacteria to other sites of plague epidemics. Panagiotakopulu suspects that black rats, endemic to India, arrived in Egypt with sea trade. In Egypt the rats picked up plague-carrying fleas and were later born on ships that sailed across the Mediterranean to southern Europe.

Present-day Plague

"Most people think of the plague as a historical disease," said Hinnebusch, who conducts plague research for the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. "But it's still out there, and it's still an international public health issue."

During the last ten years bubonic plague reappeared in Madagascar, which now has between 500 and 2,000 new cases each year.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization tallies as many as 3,000 plague cases each year around the world. Research interest in bubonic plague has been growing as, like anthrax, it could be used as a deadly bioterrorism agent (especially in pneumonic form).

While antibodies can be extremely effective against early stages of the plague, scientists are trying to learn more about how it works to be able to predict outbreaks and counteract the bacterium's scrambling of the immune system.

"There are so many unanswered questions about the plague," Hinnebusch said.

The plague will sleep for decades, even centuries, reemerge, and then seem to vanish again.

Panagiotakopulu said she wants to continue to track the evidence for the plague in Egypt and elsewhere to expand understanding of the still-mysterious epidemic.

[SoCal Pubbie]

IFRC, the book discussed social conditions at the time, in which large herds of livestock was kept in city pens to meet the growing needs for beef in the urban areas. The crowding of cows and of course the lack of knowledge of the time created a perfect breeding ground for anthrax. I'm pretty sure there was some discussion of anthrax elsewhere, but perhaps that was simply transmission with the ultimate destination of England.

I believe there were also symptoms that do not fit bubonic plague but match closely other ailments like anthrax.

[SoCal Pubbie]

Yes, I read about that. Also the belief that the disease was airborne caused "doctors" to recommend hanging heavy window coverings as a precaution, and there was a boom in the market for tapestries!

[Burkeman1]

The book "In the Wake of the Plague" mentions that England had a climate at the time that was particularly conducive towards an Anthrax epidemic starting up.

[blam]

Plague In The Ancient World

[Burkeman1]

The Pope at the tme of the Black Death had some crazy doctor that told him to always have torches and large fires burning around him to ward of the plague. He followed the docs advice even during the hot summer months and he lived. Then again no Germ could get to him being surrounded by fires.

The social mobility after the black death was tremondous especially in England. A third of the population is dead. Entire villages gone and fertile A rate land available at rock bottom prices but with the same amount of coinage in circulation! The years after the plaugue have been described as ones of glutonous hedonism.

[SoCal Pubbie]

I believe that was the one I looked at. I was just browsing at Barnes & Noble, so I did not read the whole thing. I also remember the book saying that if you were descended from a European that got the plague and survived, you may be immune to AIDS!

Since I saw old movies about the black death as a kid, I've been fascinated by the topic. The idea of mass deaths, without the attendant destruction of war, the cries of "bring out your dead", the thought of burning piles of diseased corpses, and the chilling thought it could reoccur, was always Twilight Zone territory for me. I guess a repressed mass memory of these old plagues forms the basis of the popularity of zombie movies like 28 Days Later.

[Burkeman1]

Ever since seeing Omega Man I have been fascinated by the plague phenom and it's effects. Even greater than the Black Death in Europe was the Europeon epidemics that struck the native populations of the Western Hemisphere. After initial contact these diseases spread far in advance of white exploration. Thus by the time the Spanish were expolring Mississippi and and Louisianna small pox had already wiped out the great mound building and settled town culture of those Indians tribes. They found deserted towns and villages and only scattered bands of Indians living as hunter gatherers again instead of as farmers as they had been. And this was only about 40 years after the epidemic had struck. By the time the pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock various Europeon diseases that had spread to the New England Natives from that first contact with the spanish had most likely already killed 75 percent of the population 50 years earlier before they ever layed eyes on a white man. Pizzaro conquered the Inca after they had fallen into civil war because the epidemics had traveled ahead of him and had killed 50 percent of the Inca just a few years earlier and was still raging. Germs were responsible for the Conquest of the Americans by Western culture more than any other factor.

[Burkeman1]

Just curious. Anyone know roughly what the survival rate was from the Black Death?

[Ditter]

Yes, Frontline & Advantage are excellent to keep fleas off your dogs. Be sure to be careful about using them on your cat with out the advice of your vet. One of those can be toxic to cats, can't remember which one.

[SoCal Pubbie]

Have you ever seen The Last man on Earth with Vincent Price? Like Omega Man, it was also based on I Am Legend (which is also supposed to be filmed soon).

[blam]

"The social mobility after the black death was tremondous especially in England."

Wages went way up too.

[Burkeman1]

I have seen portions of it. Rather hoaky though.

[Burkeman1]

They skyrocketed. Surviving serfs suddenly found themselves competed over by Lords. They would entice serfs of one Lord's estate to runaway to his with the promise of money or greater benefits. They also pressed their own demands for less obligation work to the Manor estate. Whereas runaway serfs were routinely returned to their estates by another lord before the plague- they were competed for with grants of land and cash payments.

[Henchman]

Let's send some Atomic vaccine to the rats in Syria and Iran.

[glasseye]

Try 'earth abides'....George Stewart

[lizma]

Sounds reasonable. I think SARS spread in China the way it did do a lack of understanding in basic hygiene and housekeeping (i.e. running water over an object cleans it.)

It's been theorized that the Y. pestis in the Middle Ages was a much more virulent strain than it is now. I don't think so. Sanitation and antibiotics today prevent any disasters. Although it is theoretically possible, it is technically unlikely to produce an antibiotic resistant strain of plague.If they did, that would be a bit of a bugger.

On an interesting side note: The History Channel had a show a few months back discussing WWII bio-terrorism. They said the Japanese had discovered a way to infest fleas with biological agents (plague, typhoid, diphtheria... All infectious diseases naturally occurring in order not to initially raise suspicion) and had devised a bomb with the ability to unload these fleas over a large population (They stated San Diego was the target). They claimed they had been quite "successful" in using a crop dusting method in Manchuria to infect the population leading to many deaths. Suspicion were never raised since the diseases were endemic to the area.

All in all I think large scale bio-terrorism is not something to worry about. You can't predict it's borders and today's terrorist are to into the shock value of their endeavors. Kill a massive amount of innocent quickly makes them proud of themselves. It the nature of the beast.

[lizma]

There are to this day mass plague graves in England that can not be touched. I suspect that's a good plan!

[Moonman62]

He advanced the theory that it would be highly unlikely, in fact, almost impossible, for the plague to gain any foothold in the U.S., Japan or Western Europe today because of the frequency with which today's societies showers or bathes with soap and hot water. The antibacterial effect of bath soap would deter the growth and be a hostile environment for the bug that causes the symptoms and sequence of the disease.

That means France is still at risk.

[nopardons]

This is fascinating. I had no idea that the Plague was this old.

Polio and cancer have been found in Egyptians mummies and the evidence of other diseases,as well. Thank GOD, that we now have vaccines against so many diseases that used to kill or disfigure or cripple so many in the past.

[StriperSniper]

.