Rats May Be Exonerated in European Plague, Say Scientists With a Gerbil Theory

[tencats]

Scientists say they may have solved a centuries-old whodunit: Why did Europe experience outbreaks of bubonic plague over hundreds of years, starting with the Black Death of 1347 to 1353?

Maybe you can blame gerbils in Asia.

The disease is caused by a bacterium that lives in rodents. The general thought had been that once the germ arrived from Asia to kick off the Black Death, it settled into European rodents and periodically jumped to humans until it disappeared in the early 1800s.

But now, scientific sleuths are suggesting that the true source of those periodic outbreaks was Asia. Maritime trade may have inadvertently imported the disease repeatedly from its ultimate reservoir, great gerbils and other small mammals in Asia, they suggest.

"I don't think there was any sustainable reservoir in Europe," Nils Stenseth of the University of Oslo said Tuesday in an email.

He and his co-authors make their case in an article published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Read more at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/25/science/rats-may-be-exonerated-in-european-plague-say-scientists-with-a-gerbil-theory.html?_r=0

[SheilaT]

1. Bubonic plague is endemic in New Mexico,

where I live. There are usually a handful of cases reported each year. It's generally thought that the fleas that carry it survive on the prairie dogs in this part of the country.

[tencats]

2. More to read on this

The Conversation
February 23 2015, 3.42pm EST
Plague outbreaks that ravaged Europe for centuries were driven by climate changes in Asia

The Black Death struck Europe in 1347, killing 30-50% of the European population in six violent years. It wasn’t a one-off epidemic: it signalled the start of the second plague pandemic in Europe that lasted for hundreds of years and only slowly disappeared from the continent after the Great Plague of London in 1665-1666.

These outbreaks were traditionally thought to be caused by rodent reservoirs of infected rats lurking in Europe’s cities, or potentially by rodent reservoirs in the wilderness. But our research, published in the journal PNAS, suggests otherwise.

If the “reservoir” thesis were correct, we would expect plague outbreaks to be associated with local climate fluctuations, through changes in agricultural yields and primary productions in forests, affecting the number of urban and wildlife rodents, resulting in more plague. We found that Europe’s plague outbreaks were indeed associated with climate fluctuations – but in Asia.

The Black Death came to Europe from Asia. Historical records tentatively map it back to outbreaks in 1345 in Astrakhan and Sarai, two trade centres located on the Volga river near the Caspian Sea.

Where the Black Death came from before it hit those cities is not known, but by recovering fragments of DNA from the teeth of plague victims in Europe, the closest currently known living relatives of this medieval strain of the plague causing bacteria Yersinia pestis are circulating in marmots and long-tailed ground squirrels in north-west China.

https://theconversation.com/plague-outbreaks-that-ravaged-europe-for-centuries-were-driven-by-climate-changes-in-asia-37933

[Hestia]

3. A book printed in UK that I special ordered went with the theory that it was guinea pigs that

exploded in population due to climate events in 450-ish in Africa. The book is called "Catastrophe" which traces the fall of the Roman Empire to a volcano exploding along with severe climate change in the satellite Roman countries which made Rome ripe for take over.

[Igel]

5. That's a trip.

AFAIK, guinea pigs were unknown outside of the New World until well after 1500.

They're native to the Andes, not to Africa a millennium pre-Columbus.

[Hestia]

6. Sorry about that - it was gerbils, not guinea pigs. Thank you for the correction

Still a very well researched book on a volcanic explosion (I do know remember where at this particular moment), and a gerbil population explosion which crowded out rats and mice and infested/infected peoples homes and food stores; how climate change changed the contemporary narrative of its time - which saw the Fall of Rome and the rise of the Mongols, and later Goths and Visigoths.

Cool - I see it is back in print.

Amazon.com Review
Everybody knows the Dark Ages weren't really dark, right? Not so fast, counters archaeological journalist David Keys, maybe it's more than just a slightly judgmental metaphor. His book Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of the Modern World, based on years of careful research spanning five continents, argues that sometime in A.D. 535, a worldwide disaster struck and uprooted nearly every culture then extant. Given contemporary reports of the sun being blotted out or weakened for nearly a year and a half, followed by famine, drought, and plague, it's hard not to think that so many reports from all over the world must be related.

Keys shows a keen grasp of both the written historical record from Asia, Africa, and Europe and the archaeological evidence from the Americas, and tells many tales of great havoc destroying old empires and laying the ground for new ones. Rome may have fallen, but Spain, England, and France rose in its place, while farther east, Japan and China each unified and gained strength after the chaos. Could an enormous volcanic eruption have had such influence on the world as a whole, and could the same thing happen tomorrow? Catastrophe makes no predictions, but leaves the reader with a new sense of history, nature, and destiny. --Rob Lightner

http://www.amazon.com/Catastrophe-Investigation-Origins-Modern-Civilization/dp/0345408764

[Thor_MN]

4. Never trust a sailor with gerbils or tribbles...

Nothing good can come from it.