DNA confirms cause of 1665 London's Great Plague
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
The plague didn't instantly reach full intensity on day one. During the early phases of the epidemic, deaths were not yet widespread enough to require mass graves, and burials proceeded semi-normally.
During the later, more intense phases, things were much worse. There were both more bodies needing to be buried and fewer available funerary service providers such as coffinmakers and undertakers around to deal with them, since many had themselves either died of the plague or fled the city. Faced with growing heaps of rotting infectious corpses in the streets, hastily dug mass graves were often resorted to by the survivors.
Back then, most would have roots in some farm. Heck, that's true for many many people today, my parents, for example, my mother's home is still a working farm....
Now, if you had to become a serf again to go back to the farm....
Many were, however, unable to leave because they had nowhere to go. Many came from families that had been in the city for generations and now had no contact with their ancestral villages. There was no Facebook or telephones, and poor people could usually neither write nor afford postage even if they could write. Moreover, families were frequently fractured. Unwanted children were simply turned out into the street, or they might wind up there when their parents died. They then had no clue who their relatives were or what village they'd come from.
Classical medieval serfdom had largely died out by the 17th century in England, but the villages were still often grindingly poor. There wasn't enough food to feed the (poor) people who lived there normally. Even during normal times, some penniless distant cousin showing up from London would often be despised as yet another mouth to feed (which is why they'd moved to the city in the first place.)
Many others just couldn't afford the trip. The sheer level of extreme poverty in which most Londoners lived at the time is hard to imagine for westerners today. Travel itself was expensive and dangerous during normal times, even for those who had some place to go. The plague made it more expensive and more dangerous.
For bottom-rung workers ekeing out a marginal sub-subsistence existence, for people who went hungry several days each week anyway during the best times, hiring a horse was out of the question. Their only option was to walk, perhaps for weeks, with whatever food and money they could carry. Poor people (read: almost everyone) had no access to banking services, so if they lost that money, they were screwed. (This wasn't a problem for most, as they didn't have any money to begin with.)
They not only faced highway robbery at every turn, but hostile peasants. No rural village was opening its arms to take in people who had just come directly from plague-ridden London. Such people were seen as dangerous threats, walking disease vectors likely to infect the whole town and kill everyone if they were not immediately driven off.
Wealthy people, by contrast, had horses, carriages, servants, guards, private food stores, and gated country estates.
Somehow I missed the "this is the 1665 plague" (and forgot about, for example, Newton went back home when Cambridge University closed as a precaution), and was thinking back to the big initial wave in the 14th Century (the Black Death) when England and London weren't quite as advanced; kinda scary it kept hitting in waves for 3+ centuries....
https://goldin.shinyapps.io/Search_Pepys/
(enter plague as keyword, click on the tab marked histogram, or browse the entries)
That said, I would like these news articles to actually link to the scientific paper, or if the paper is not published yet/still under review, at least mention that.
Just having a DNA sequence is quite some distance from the proteins it produces, the regulatory system that governs what, when and how much, and the effect of them on us poor animals. But this has got to be a hot area of research....
Thank god, what a relief !
To be frank, looking at the pictures of students working on site,that very question crossed my mind.
The people in the pictures do not appear to wear much protection.
One recent example of what you suggest is the recent Anthrax outbreak in Siberia. Though in this situation we are talking 1) about a pathogen that is particularly famous for ability to form spores and survive a long time and 2) frozen state
The real trick is to avoid creating and breathing in an aerosol, which has I'm sure killed more than one researcher before he and his doctor realized what was happening, I heard of one such case in the '70s when I was doing work on E. Coli during a summer program involving salmonella. If you get too much lung tissue---lots of surface area---infected too quickly, well, see pneumonic plague, it's anthrax equivalent, which an Air Force flight surgeon's manual said the first clear diagnostic sign from a patient is his sudden death, etc.
And echoing loxs, it's very unlikely they're working with viable bacteria, if they're just sequencing DNA or the like they're far, far from something viable, and I don't believe it creates spores.
And many can be countered with standard mutations, i.e. something that messes with the surface protein that transports them inside. When I was doing a bit of E. Coli microbiology in the summer of 1977 the conventional wisdom was for a generic antibiotic, like the colicin we were working with, 1 in a million bacterial would spontaneously develop a mutation (which I further did the grunt work to prove the ones we had were of the surface protein type, by and large). Streptomycin, though, would take 1 in a billion.
Of course, passing through humans for a half century, and then through these rodents, it won't be quite the same, but...
To put that into perspective - Y. pestis' main chromosome is a little over 4 million basepairs. So it is only broken pieces of code that they can recover, not the whole, intact bacterium. No risk here.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v478/n7370/full/nature1...
The official third and most recent pandemic started in 1855 in China and reached the US by the turn of the century, so we have much more solid reports of that strain's behavior: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_(disease)#Third_pandemi...
It's only in the last 150 years that it gained scientific acceptance.
It took a while for the scientific community to accept that some diseases are caused by a lack of vitamins, for example.
Although we must be careful, in one of my more interesting jobs, building a full text database for Year Book Medical Publishers (a part of Time ... -Life? Time as in the LA Times back then), the leading article for the general book for that year was on the proof of gastrointestinal ulcer being caused by a bacteria. The editor of that entry figuratively smiled about "taking away another disease from" ... whichever specialists assigned it all to stress (which of course can predispose someone to getting an infection).
Or that the majority of the human body by cell count is actually composed of bacteria...
The book wasn't very film-able, so the movie they made from it was quite different in approach.
I've also heard there's a non-fiction book about the "Spanish flu" outbreak that basically reads like a zombie film (e.g. one interesting tidbit, they call it the Spanish Flu because that is where the first reported cases were, but it didn't start there, the other countries just suppressed the information because they were at war)