* Astronomy

Blobrana · L

RE: Bubonic plague

Blobrana · L

Gerbils and Silk Road to blame for plague

Most would choose the cuddly gerbil over the much-maligned rat. But the latter's bad reputation may not be fully deserved. Central Asian rodents, not rats, prospering under warm variations in climate, could have been to blame for the arrival of the Black Death in Europe in 1347 and for repeated outbreaks of plague over the next four centuries that killed millions of people.
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Blobrana · L

'Gerbils not rats' carried the plague to Europe

Scientists in Norway believe gerbils not black rats are to blame for outbreaks of the bubonic plague across medieval Europe.
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Scientists find ancient plague DNA in teeth

Scientists say two of the deadliest pandemics in history were caused by strains of the same plague and warn that new versions of the bacteria could spark future outbreaks.
Researchers found tiny bits of DNA in the teeth of two German victims killed by the Justinian plague about 1,500 years ago. With those fragments, they reconstructed the genome of the oldest bacteria known.
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Black Death

Blobrana · L

RE: Bubonic plague

Blobrana · L

The effects of plague on wildlife may have been underestimated in the past, according to research published today in a special issue of Vector-Borne and Zoonotic Diseases.
Plague, a flea-borne bacterial disease introduced to North America in the late 1800s, spreads rapidly across a landscape, causing devastating effects to wildlife and posing risks to people. Conservation and recovery efforts for imperilled species such as the black-footed ferret and Utah prairie dog are greatly hampered by the effects of plague. Eruptions of the fatal disease have wiped out prairie dog colonies, as well as dependent ferret populations, in many locations over the years.
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Rare infection may have caused death of Chicago scientist
A University of Chicago researcher died Sun., Sept. 13, at the Medical Centre's Bernard Mitchell Hospital from an infection which may be attributable to a weakened laboratory strain of Yersinia pestis, the bacteria that causes the plague.

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Blobrana · L

The Black Death continues to cast a shadow across England. Although the modern English population is more cosmopolitan than ever, the plagues known as the Black Death killed so many people in the Middle Ages that, to this day, genetic diversity is lower in England than it was in the 11th century, according to a new analysis.
Rus Hoelzel at the University of Durham, UK and his colleagues looked at the mitochondrial DNA from human remains at 4th and 11th century archaeological sites in England, and compared them to samples from the modern population stored on DNA databases such as GenBank. They found there was more variation in the ancient mitochondrial DNA sequences than in modern sequences.
Hoelzel thinks random genetic drift may have lowered genetic diversity naturally. But the large unexpected drop in diversity was more likely to have been caused by population crashes following major outbreaks of the Black Death in England during the 1340s and the 1660s.

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