Posted on 01/04/2005 7:21:29 PM PST by blam
Black Death mutant gene resists Aids, say scientists
Jan 4 2005
By Alan Weston, Daily Post
IT HAS been described as the 'world's greatest serial killer'.
The Black Death was a catastrophe which wiped out nearly half the European population, with 20m people dying between 1348 and 1350.
But new research being carried out by a team from Liverpool University has shown that the disease may have produced an unexpected side-effect - resistance to the deadly HIV/Aids virus.
Professor Christopher Duncan and Dr Susan Scott have already caused shockwaves among historians with their claim that the Black Death was caused by a life-threatening virus, which has been lying dormant and could re-appear at any time.
The traditional view, still accepted by the majority of historians, is that the killer disease was a form of bubonic plague which was spread by fleas jumping from infected rats to humans.
Now the latest research by Prof Duncan and Dr Scott, from the university's School of Biological Sciences, has revealed that those who survived the Black Death may have inherited a mutant gene.
This gave their descendants, many generations later, increased resistance to the HIV virus.
Such a theory helps to explain, they say, why Aids has not taken hold in Europe to the same extent as it has in sub-Saharan Africa, which suffered from a different form of plague than that which ravaged the British Isles and the rest of continental Europe for three centuries.
Prof Duncan said: "We know that 10pc of the European population are genetically resistant to HIV. They do not catch the disease even after continued exposure, and it is only in Europe that this genetic mutation can be found.
"We believe it was the Black Death which caused this mutation, as people gradually formed an in-built resistance to the disease.
"As there was no Black Death in Africa, there was no resistance to the HIV infection.
"The lucky people who are resistant to HIV have benefited because their ancestors were resistant to Black Death, and they bore children who also carried the mutant gene."
Much of Prof Duncan and Dr Scott's researches have been carried out in the Peak District village of Eyam, one of the last English villages to be infected by an outbreak of the plague in 1665-66, where they have studied original parish records, wills and diaries to create a profile of the disease.
They claim the disease could not have been spread by the fleas on rats as the rodents could not have travelled far or quickly enough.
Instead, it was an infectious disease passed from person to person. If a similar kind of virus was to emerge in today's globalised society, the fatal illness would be spread quickly around the world.
The Liverpool research team say their revolutionary theory as to what caused the Black Death and made it spread like wildfire across Europe is gaining growing acceptance.
The scientists are due to present the latest findings of their research into the Aids-Black Death link in the Journal of Medical Genetics.
alanweston@dailypost.co.uk
Bummer.
Read this
Higher incident of resistant would increase the number of carriers.
It appears resistant HIV guys are HIV+ and capable of spreading the disease. It just doesn't effect their t-cells like the virus normally would.
It sounds like infection rate would rise. You would have a population that could spread this without the shortened lifespan normally seen with this disease.
I am in the LOWEST risk group!
I am married 34 years - neither I nor my wife fool-around (except with each other), don't use drugs, don't socialize with perverts or low life scum. We definitely do NOT allow bill/hillary clinton near us!
Kind of hard to catch a sexually transmitted disease this way.
The classic example here is the so-called ''Spanish Influenza'' of 1918-1921; viral infection of course, and was particularly nasty IN Europe, on a population-adjusted basis.
This is just another copy-bar for those who would whistle their personal behaviour past the graveyard of assorted retroviruses.
Better to say, the viri killed off more of those without the gene, but those with it lived to produce offspring they passed this to. I don't think that people normally acquire a mutation except at conception.
Come on, blam, you of all people know that a comet is merely a snowball and would not survive through our atmosphere.
I think the term would be "asteroid" rather than "comet".
Hudson Bay maybe?
Well, insofar as it's meaningful to argue about a historical term... Historians generally consider the Dark Ages to have begun in the fifth century, when a series of barbarian peoples invaded the Mediterranean world and destroyed urban civilization.
Sounds kinda like the USA and its invading illegals right now...
"I think the term would be "asteroid" rather than "comet"."
Read the link in post #23.
I saw a program on this subject. The way I understood it was..if both your parents ancestors were survivors of the black plague, then you are born with an extra resistant gene and therefore resistant to the aids virus. But it must come through both parents.
Exactly. The descriptions of the deaths during the various and sundry plagues in Europe do show that Yersinia Pestis was the culprit. (Of course, the plague that devasted ancient Athens is still a mystery.) There were also numerous descriptions of dead rats just before the Black Death arrived. (Perhaps the Christian association of cats with witchcraft was a problem; on the other hand, dogs can make good ratters too.)
Rome seemed to do well (in its heyday) because the city fathers concentrated on garbage removal and on having lots of water. General hygene helps controll all the plagues.
There were always a few localities within Europe which were not ravaged by the Black Death. Perhaps their inhabitants had the protective gene.
"Historians generally consider the Dark Ages to have begun in the fifth century, when a series of barbarian peoples invaded the Mediterranean world and destroyed urban civilization."
The Germanic "barbarians" did not destroy Mediterranean civilization. The various Gothic rulers of the Italian peninsula kept the Roman administration and city structure functioning as it had been for centuries.
Credit for the destruction and depopulation of urban areas in the Mediterranean goes to the decades long war of reconquest of the Italian mainland by the forces of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian and his general Belisarius.
Great. Infect yourself with the Black Death virus and maybe you'll be innoculated against Aids.
Dave Barry couldn't make this stuff up.
I'm familiar with this theory. However, 536 AD was a hundred and fifty-eight years after the Battle of Adrianople, a hundred and twenty-six years after Alaric's sack of Rome, ninety-seven years after the Vandal conquest of Carthage, and sixty years after the deposition of the last Western Roman emperor. The Dark Ages were well and truly established by then.
This is the Delta-32 mutation. It has been widely studied and yes, indeed, a person of European descent who is homozygous (has two copies) of the Delta-32 is immune to black death and aids.
"I don't think that people normally acquire a mutation except at conception."
The hypothesis is, I believe, that a virus can insert itself into the cells that produce the gametes and transfer the mutation to offspring. So you are correct, but this is a new mechanism they are investigating in the study of the mechanisms of evolution.
You understand that a mutation doesn't necessarily cause an immediate change in phenotype. The mutation could be in the junk DNA and not activated.
The Visigoths, who lacked a tradition of urban government and who were faced with the legal and administrative needs of a large subject population, did indeed adopt and maintain much of the form of Roman government. However, the titanic economic devastation incurred (such as superinflation and Diocletian's edict essentially terminating the free market) by centuries of warfare against the Germanic barbarians had long since doomed the Roman Empire, years before the hordes themselves finally broke through and physically destroyed places like Aquileia, Cologne, and Rome.
That the Germanic barbarians used Roman forms to preside over the civilization they had destroyed is not surprising. To pretend that what they ruled was still Roman civilization, however, is erroneous.
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