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The bubonic plague killed so many people in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa that that natural selection event is still rippling through our genomes today. But the same genes that helped your ancestors survive the Black Death may be contributing to autoimmune disease today.Have an Autoimmune Disease? Blame the Black Death | 7:16SciShow | 7.77M subscribers | 572,860 views | November 7, 2023

There are few events in human history as ominous — both in name and impact — as the Black Death. The bubonic plague pandemic made its way across Eurasia and north Africa between 1346 and 1553. It's estimated to have killed up to 200 million people, or 60 per cent of the Earth's entire population at the time. Now, scientists believe they have pinpointed the origin of the Black Death to a region of present day Kyrgyzstan called Issyk-Kul, once a stopover on the Silk Road trade route in the 14th century. Its place of origin has been one of...

The plague is an infectious disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis that occurs in three forms. Pneumonic plague infects the lungs causing shortness of breath, coughing and chest pain; bubonic plague affects the lymph nodes making them swell; and septicemic plague infects the blood and can cause tissues to turn black and die.The burials were found in Drasenhofen in the Austrian state of Lower Austria, where archaeologists have excavated a row-grave cemetery comprising of 22 burials.Both plague victims are males who died at the age of 23 to 30 and 22 to 27 during the Early Bronze Age around...

New paper detects plague bacteria in three of 34 bodies they tested in Britain, all dating to about 4,000 years ago. Research has also found good news for rat loversThough it is rare today, we remain gripped by fear of plague. There is no vaccine against it, though it is treatable with antibiotics as it’s caused by bacteria. It wasn’t treatable at all before the era of modern medicine, and periodically sowed terror and death throughout Eurasia and the Middle East. But the burning questions of the day are: When did it emerge, and when did it first reach Britain?...

The Forum in Rome, dedicated to Julius Caesar, was completed in 46 B.C. as a site for conducting public business generally related to the Roman Senate. Much later, during the 16th century, the site was still usable—Renaissance-era people used it as a hospital. Doctors of the time knew that diseases could be infectious, so they set up protocols for dealing with them and the clothes and tools used to treat ill patients.Prior research has shown that doctors and medical researchers in Italy played a major role in establishing protocols, such disposal of instruments after a single use, and disposing of...

When the bubonic plague arrived in London in 1348, the disease devastated the city. So many people died, so quickly, that the city's cemeteries filled up. "So the king [Edward III], at the time, bought this piece of land and started digging it," says geneticist Luis Barreiro at the University of Chicago. This cemetery, called East Smithfield, became a mass grave, where more than 700 people were buried together. "There's basically layers and layers of bodies one on top of each other," he says. The city shut down the cemetery when the outbreak ended. In the end, this bubonic plague,...

JENA, GERMANY—Phys.org reports that a study of genetic material recovered from the teeth of people buried in the Hagios Charalambos cave on the Greek island of Crete between about 2290 and 1909 B.C. detected the presence of extinct strains of two pathogens. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, the British School at Athens, and Temple University suggest that epidemics brought about by Y. pestis, which causes plague, and S. enterica, which causes typhoid fever, could have contributed to the collapse of Egypt’s Old Kingdom and the Akkadian...

The Black Death was a devastating global epidemic of bubonic plague that struck Europe and Asia in the mid-1300s. The plague arrived in Europe in October 1347, when 12 ships from the Black Sea docked at the Sicilian port of Messina. People gathered on the docks were met with a horrifying surprise: Most sailors aboard the ships were dead, and those still alive were gravely ill and covered in black boils that oozed blood and pus. Sicilian authorities hastily ordered the fleet of “death ships” out of the harbor, but it was too late: Over the next five years, the...

It's a simple rule-of-thumb to follow when you have a rat problem, according to Corrigan, who has a Ph.D. in urban rats studies and advises cities, including the District. “The rats do not like to chew into bleach tasting anything,” he says. “If the outside of the can smells like bleach to that famous nose of theirs, they're like, 'Well, this ain't food.’”

The plague brought about the rise of the middle class - and pubsThe Black Death is the world’s most infamous plague, killing an estimated 75m people and profoundly changing the way survivors lived their lives.In Europe, the disease killed half the population, and completely wiped out some towns when it struck in Britain in 1348-49. But the Black Death returned regularly, first in 1361 and continuing - increasingly as an urban disease - until the Great Plague of 1665 in London. Here is how it changed the world.Social effects We know now that deaths caused by the plague’s first outbreak...

The aftermath of the plague created a series of religious, social, and economic upheavals, which had profound effects on the course of European history. It took 150 years for Europe’s population to recover, and the effects of the plague irrevocably changed the social structure, resulting in widespread persecution of minorities such as Jews, foreigners, beggars, and lepers. The uncertainty of daily survival has been seen as creating a general mood of morbidity, influencing people to “live for the moment.” Because 14th-century healers were at a loss to explain the cause of the plague, Europeans turned to astrological forces, earthquakes, and...

Gene sequencing, from which scientists can gather hereditary data of organisms, has revealed that the Black Death, often referred to as The Plague, which reduced the world’s total population by about 100 million, originated from China over 2000 years ago, scientists from several countries wrote in the medical journal Nature Genetics. Genome sequencing has allowed the researchers to reconstruct plague pandemics from the Black Death to the late 1800s.Black Death and The Plague – the plague is an infectious disease caused by a bacterium called Yersinia pestis. The Black Death is one huge plague event (pandemic) in history. The Black...

The specifics of how the person contracted the plague have not been revealed Three other people 250 miles (400km) away have been diagnosed this month Two have the bubonic plague while two have the more lethal pneumonic strain One man was treated for the bubonic plague after he ate a wild rabbit, while the first two patients were diagnosed with the more fatal and contagious pneumonic strain.

The recent news that a Colorado man was diagnosed with the plague may have left some wondering: Does that still happen here?The answer, somewhat surprisingly, is yes.While the last plague epidemic in the United States was back in 1924, when 37 people died in Los Angeles, the much-feared disease still surfaces in humans from time to time, though it's very infrequent — and fully treatable with antibiotics if it's caught in time."Plague... spread from urban rats to rural rodent species, and became entrenched in many areas of the western United States," the CDC explains. "Since that time, plague has...

Excavations for London's Crossrail project have unearthed bodies believed to date from the time of the Black Death. A burial ground was known to be in an area outside the City of London, but its exact location remained a mystery. Thirteen bodies have been found so far in the 5.5m-wide shaft at the edge of Charterhouse Square, alongside pottery dated to the mid-14th Century. Analysis will shed light on the plague and the Londoners of the day. The skeletons' arrangement in two neat rows suggests they date from the earliest era of the Black Death, before it fully developed into...

Los Angeles County public health and U.S. Forest Service officials have closed the Los Alamos Campground in the Angeles National Forest after a California ground squirrel captured two weeks ago tested positive for plague. The camp, between Gorman and Pyramid Lake, was closed Saturday afternoon and will remain closed for at least 10 days, said Jonathan Fielding, the county's public health director. Squirrel burrows in the area will be dusted for fleas, and further testing will be conducted before the campground is reopened. "We're fortunate to have caught this," Fielding said. "This case now is about prevention." Plague is a...

For centuries, rats and fleas have been fingered as the culprits responsible for the Black Death, the medieval plague that killed as many as two thirds of Europe’s population. But historians studying 14th-century court records from Dorset believe they may have uncovered evidence that exonerates them. The parchment records, contained in a recently-discovered archive, reveal that an estimated 50 per cent of the 2,000 people living in Gillingham died within four months of the Black Death reaching the town in October 1348. The deaths are recorded in land transfers lodged with the manorial court which – unusually for the period...

Tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) is one of the oldest known diseases of the plant world. Plague--known as the "black death" in medieval Europe--is one of the oldest diseases afflicting humans, and has become a focus of concern in recent years because of its potential use as a bioweapon. Now scientists have transformed TMV to infect host plants and produce immunizing proteins rather than debilitating leaf shrivel, turning greenhouse tobacco into a biofactory for plague vaccine. Biotechnology specialists Charles Arntzen and his colleagues at Arizona State University used a process developed in Germany to effect the change. First, they injected the...

Camus as Conservative: A post 9/11 reassessment of the work of Albert Camus Murray Soupcoff The Guardian -- that last fanatical bastion of English left-wing obstinacy and foolishness -- published a unique book review honouring the latest Penguin edition of The Plague, the enduring fictional allegory of human suffering and sacrifice, written by French existentialist novelist Albert Camus. It was particularly surprising that The Guardian, of all publications, would publish what was really a revised introduction to the latest English-language edition of The Plague, since Camus' unique philosophical and political point of view was always so different from that of...