How Devastating was the Black Death? | Hacker News Reader

How Devastating was the Black Death?

medievalhistories.com

118 pointsakakievich52 comments

Actual paper is titled “Next-generation ice core technology reveals true minimum natural levels of lead (Pb) in the atmosphere: Insights from the Black Death”.

The gist is that we’ve been operating under wrong assumptions about what normal background levels of lead in the atmosphere are like. What we used to consider normal turns out to be affected by pre-industrial human activities way more than we thought. Natural lead levels, as the paper shows, are much lower. Assuming we’ve found the true baseline levels, we see that we and our ancestors were/are being exposed to higher, relative to baseline, lead levels than we thought.

The main kicker of this research to me is that it puts into question some previous research pertaining to human health and lead (which, as we do already know, don’t go well together at all—the friendly paper[0] provides a summary), as well as current public health measures.

[0] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2017GH000064/full

Clair Patterson, during a 60 year quest to prove that lead in our modern environment was harmful, went to tremendous lengths to find evidence of pre-industrial levels of lead. This is the guy who invented the clean room and associated techniques.

Were he alive today I imagine he would be glad to see this research ongoing.

Fascinating (and long) read about his journey here. http://mentalfloss.com/article/94569/clair-patterson-scienti...

Malaria is also intriguing. According to Michael Stevens, as many as half of all humans who have ever lived (~50 billion) have died to Malaria. I've always wondered whether this was true. https://youtu.be/1T4XMNN4bNM?t=235

I remember reading an article by an African bloke in healthcare (can't recall the actual role) who was saying that the West's obsession with malaria is patronising. He said that malaria is like the flu - you get it, you're sick for a little while, then you get over it. Yes, some people die, but they tend to be the old and weak, just like the flu - yet the west doesn't go bananas over the flu like it does with malaria.

Looking at the wikipedia articles for both, it seems he has a point. 300M cases of malaria in 2015, with 750k deaths. 3-5M cases of influenza annually, with 350k deaths.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza

Given those numbers, I'm not sure I'd believe that half of all humans died from malaria.

>Yes, some people die, but they tend to be the old and weak, just like the flu

Actually they tend to be children. Of the 438k estimated deaths from Malaria in 2015, 75% (306k) were under the age of 5. [1]

But your comparison with influenza is a good one. Despite the estimated 12000 influenza associated deaths in the US in the 2015/16 seasons, there were only ~85 influenza associated pediatric deaths. [2][3]. By comparison, globally from 2000-2015 Pneumonia was responsible for 16% of deaths in children under the age of 5, while Malaria was 5%. [4]

The data suggests that the high impact of Malaria on infant mortality has more to do with inadequate availability of healthcare. Unsurprising given that the under 5 mortality rate in sub-Saharan africa is 14 times that of developed regions. [5]

[1] http://www.who.int/malaria/media/world-malaria-day-2016/en/

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/disease/2015-16.htm

[3] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/season/flu-season-2015-2016.ht...

[4] http://www.who.int/gho/child_health/mortality/causes/en/

[5] http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs178/en/

To be fair though, think about getting the flu without access to clean water or decent food.

When you're vomiting several times a day, it's necessary to stay hydrated. If you live in a place without a steady supply of clean water, you're kind of screwed and dehydration is a very big risk.

Looking at the symptoms of malaria, fever, vomiting, and diarrhea are all problems. Before the modern era I could see that being very dangerous.

There are several different strains, with different lethality. Also, in Africa the disease has been endemic long enough that the population has developed resistance. Malaria is much more dangerous to naive hosts, hence the high mortality rate amongst caucasians in Africa, described as the "White Man's Grave" in the 19th century. There has also been some research done on the burden to economic productivity from chronic malaria, which is quite significant. Malaria is also a contributor to higher infant and childhood mortality in endemic regions: you get the disease as a child and it either kills you or your immune system learns how to keep the chronic disease in check.

Could the numbers also be influenced, literally, by survivorship bias? Those that survived malaria likely had a genetic advantage that they passed along, while those that didn't died. Malaria may have far less impact today than in the past.

At least one such genetic advantage has already been identified: the gene mutation that causes Sickle Cell Anemia when present as two copies conveys malaria resistance as a singleton. In areas where malaria is endemic, it would be selected for.

When you're living with the threat every day, and mostly every day you're fine and no one you know typically dies from the threat, maybe for years at a time, it's pretty normal for humans to dismiss that threat as not worth worrying about. Most people in the west don't take influenza seriously because most people don't get it, and even fewer people know someone who died from it. It's actually to the point where people don't really know what the flu is anymore, and attribute all sorts of other things colloquially to flu; stomach flu, 24-hour flu, etc.

Malaria is this foreign, exotic, tropical disease. Malaria is a disease somewhere else, not in mid-Michigan. When all you have to go on is news stories and statistics, and no personal experience, it's easy to go off the deep end without personal experience.

People do this with everything. Dangers you live with and manage are fine, foreign threats, un-experienced threats, unknown threats are magnified regardless of the actual threat. People are pretty bad when left to their own devices at relative risk management.

I mean how do you think driving in a blizzard sounds to someone who lives in a place where they only see snow on TV and in movies? Compared to a person who lives in a place with 3-5 months of winter driving every year. Or hurricanes for people who live through hurricane season and people who just see it on the weather channel. Drastically different experience certainly color a lot of worldviews on every sort of danger and threat.

Influenza has a cheap and very effective family of vaccines. Malaria doesn't. People in "the west" "go bananas" over Malaria because it's not reasonably preventable.

Malaria was eradicated in the US and Europe. It used to be endemic. Eradication is a pretty solid way to prevent it.

https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/elimination_us.htm...

Except it hasn't worked everywhere. The point was that this was a practical issue and not a cultural one. Someone in "the west" who is paranoid about getting the flu just gets a flu shot. The same paranoia for Malaria has no treatment, so the same person with the same fears ends up "going bananas" about travel to Central America or whatnot.

A lot of work is going into reducing the effects of malaria:

https://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/Mapping-the-End-of-Malaria

There is indeed a bit gap between how we perceive it and how it is lived in Africa. But it's also because we don't get sick the same way. I lived in mali for 2 years and got malaria. The yearly crisis I get are very strong. But many people I met there were experiencing malaria like I'm experiencing the flu.

Might be where I’ve lived (North Dakota & Minnesota), but we do go nuts over the flu. The number of places that start advertising flu shoots and never mind all the reminders. Plus, the fun when they miss a strain in their formula.

Given the flu is killer and we spend most of autumn and winter warning people about it and to get vaccinated against the newer strains...

... I’m ok with that comparison

> yet the west doesn't go bananas over the flu like it does with malaria.

At least in Germany we had a few killer flu scares. With politicians buying ( and throwing away ) tons of third rate vaccines that had a higher likelihood of making you sick than you had of catching the flu.

My uncle got this particular type of flue- after he was in africa, every 2 months. Malaria kills in combination with other diseases and malnourishment.

Yeah, I was really surprised when a friend from Tanzania told me he'd had Malaria >10 times, and shrugged it off as if it was no big deal.

Have had it a couple of times. It's only a problem if you don't get any medication to get rid of it. It doesn't go away on its own easily. Otherwise its like a flu..

You would have to stay ill for weeks for it to start becoming life threatening. Keep in mind the immune system can't easily fight it on its own so its not like the flu in certain ways. Having 'semi immunity' only means you don't get it as bad as it can be, but you still get ill.

> the West's obsession with malaria is patronising

It is and it is also a consequence of history: Malaria was the unexpected enemy western cultures had to fight in their colonies. The one thing a bullet to the head or chopping off slaves' hands[0] won't fix. We are afraid of malaria and therefore try to eradicate it. Problem is: People who live in malaria-infested places usually have more important things to worry about. Imagine, you are a hungry African and some humanitarian aid workers come by in air-conditioned 4WDs to help you: With fscking mosquito nets![1] What do you say? "Thank you, the 0.82 kids I can statistically expect to die from malaria[2] will survive. Now all my 7 kids can starve to death! Thank you!"

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State#Economy_durin...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/25/world/africa/mosquito-net...

[2] I made up that number.

I wonder if malaria was really unexpected, since parts of Europe were malarious, too.

In Italy about one third of the country was affected[0]. Even Switzerland had serious problems with malaria, especially near the Lake of Bienne, because the alluvial sands caused the Aare river to repeatedly flood the plains between Murten and Solothurn, turning agricultural land into marsh[1].

[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3340992/figure/...

[1]: https://www.bernerzeitung.ch/region/bern/Als-der-Aareteufel-... (German)

It was devastating enough to end the Mongol empire. This empire included pretty much all of Asia. With the demise of the empire, the silk road trade pretty much closed down, cutting China off from the Middle East and Europe.

I didn't know it went that far east. So it pretty much completely changed the course of events instead of just delaying progress for a few decades...interesting.

Keep in mind that the mongols didn't really have the institutions to survive anyway and that the empire was breaking apart anyway.

The plague was a stressor that sped some things along.

The plague didn't hit until after the Mongol empire fracture. I don't know what institutions you think the Mongols were missing, but an empire that size is just waiting to fragment.

You have it backwards. The plague starts in east Asia, then spreads West along the Silk Road, it arrives at the Black Sea, and then is carried to Venice. Most likely it was in rats that were on the ships which the merchants of Venice operated in the Black Sea. It arrives in Venice in 1347, and the next 36 months are the event that in the West is called The Black Death.

This was the 1346-53 epidemic. The earlier black death epidemic starting at 541 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_of_Justinian) was a bit more influental, and killed about 40% of the population. This came from Egypt to Europe. But recent genetic studies also suggest it came from China instead, same as the later plagues.

Per Wikipedia: "The Black Death is thought to have originated in the arid plains of Central Asia, where it then travelled along the Silk Road, reaching Crimea by 1343.[6] From there, it was most likely carried by Oriental rat fleas living on the black rats that were regular passengers on merchant ships."

So (if they're right), it actually started there, and came west.

The rat flea vector is also the origin of the term "Flea Market".

Actually, there are arguments that it enabled progress by disrupting the established order. The beginnings of the Renaissance in Europe date to the decades immediately after the Plague first swept through.

For many years historians depended on written sources to assess the calamity of such events as the Black Death. This yielded widely disparate conclusions claiming that the death-toll lay between 30 to 50%...

Now, a new study of annual to multiannual levels of lead in the Alpine glacier, Colle Gnifetti, in the Swiss-Italian Alps provides further validation of the calamitous character of the plague and the accompanying events in the 14th century. These new hard-core data demonstrates the impact which the Black Death had on society and economy.

It's nice to have something that is potentially objective.

It's still rather indirect. If the population drops significantly then many types of mining simply becomes redundant because there is so much material no longer needed by the dead.

Well, lead deposition dropped about two orders of magnitude in ~1350. That's far more than a proportional decrease, unless the death rate was over 90%. Societal collapse seems more likely.

Not collapse: recycling. In a steady state population, you need to be mining enough new metal to replace items lost to use or rust. If the population drops, people just start using dead uncle Harald's knives when theirs break.

In such a situation, you'd actually expect expensive new production to drop all the way to zero until the recycling buffer was used up. The effect would be superlinear with the death rate, not proportional.

Maybe so. But maybe the recycling argument doesn't apply so much for lead as for iron.

It applies more so for things I've dealt with. Iron rusts while lead doesn't. Flashings and windows etc that use lead last a very long time, iron doesn't.

The contention in the linked article was that atmospheric lead was the result of metal smelting. They're measuring the mining industry as a whole, not lead production.

Whatever they say, they're measuring production of lead and other metals that occur with it. Silver, copper and zinc would be the main ones, I think. Not iron, however.

Perhaps centers of industrial production are more prone to damage from pandemics than rural areas meaning that mines and factories will be gutted out while farms and villages are maybe less damaged?

Farms and villages just get abandoned, decay, and are lost to time.

Central to the researchers' argument is that human livelihood causes pollution. I wonder what the "ideal" global limit is.

I never finished my bachelor's, but I was an environmental resource management major for a time. The reality is that we keep seeing improvements in average life expectancy and overall quality of life while the global population grows. Meanwhile, everyone declares it the end of the world and decries the fact that humans are the cause of our own demise.

While we certainly have the power to be the cause of our own demise, my opinion is that rumors of our death are exaggerated. I think there is still substantial room for improvement in how humans manage earth's resources such that we can adequately provide for our population.

One of my favorite cartoons from one of my college textbooks showed a bunch of single celled organisms giving off oxygen to create Earth's oxygen rich atmosphere and some of them organizing to complain of how they were poisoning the environment with all this oxygen.

It is no doubt true that humans impact the environment and some of the impacts are absolutely negative. But there is substantial reason to believe that it is far more complex than that, but humans have an incredible talent for taking positives for granted and dwelling overly much on the negatives.

One of my favorite examples is that Y2K was predicted to be the end of the world. When it got solved beforehand and turned out to be very anticlimactic, with a few VCRs that couldn't be programmed and silly things like that (instead of global financial meltdown as our banking systems failed), people then acted like those who had prepped for the worse were idiots. These days, people often frame the entire thing like "Those fools! Why did they ever think they were in danger?" No one gets up daily and thanks their lucky stars that they aren't living in the Y2K Post Apocalypse. Instead, they read the news and complain about all the reasons the world is going to hell currently.

If humans were not here, presumably crocodiles or something would be the top species on earth. I don't imagine they would husband earth's resources any better than we are.

Not intended as snark. These are just some basic points I like to talk about when I get the chance. Thank you for giving me a good excuse and I apologize if my framing is in any way aggravating.

Best.

Not read as snark at all. In fact your note came off as thoughtful and kind.

I didn't mean to imply that the world is coming to an end. I simply hadn't realized how coupled pollution (lead in this case) & economic progress have been. IIRC the rate of species extinction has been accelerating especially for sea life (too lazy to lookup citation). That's real, irreparable harm, at least to those species.

But that's backward looking. I'm optimistic that technology advancements will cap energy usage per person and still enable us to advance society.

And FWIW... my few hunter friends claim boars would dominate North America if humans weren't around. Surprisingly smart, powerful, and aggressive creatures.

A few years ago, I crossed the country on foot with my sons. They were both pretty meh about a lot of the dangers we faced. Wild boars heard at night in parts of Texas was the only thing that really got my oldest son concerned and I got regaled with how dangerous they can be.

So, that is entirely possible.

I'm optimistic that technology advancements will cap energy usage per person and still enable us to advance society.

I think we need to aggressively promote passive solar, basically. Just skip the energy use entirely, where we can. But I get dismissed as a loon. (shrug)

I'm also a little curious about what happened about a century later—the line drops by about 90% for another decade or so in the mid-1400s. It's the only other significant drop in the chart (other than a single outlier datum in the late 1800s that might be an error of some sort).

There was a devastating cold period in the 1430s (cause still unknown to the best of my knowledge) that caused widespread global famine and in the 1450s the south Pacific volcano Kuwae had what seems to be two stratospheric eruptions within the decade. It was, in general, a shitty time to be alive no matter where you were on the planet.

tl;dr pretty fucking bad.

This article use the presence of particles associated with mining found in ice cores of European glaciers to conclude that mining basically collapsed and that it was in fact "pretty fucking bad".

The Black Death killed almost everyone settled (ie not a bedouin) in Palestine. This is important because no one can claim their ancestors lived on the land for a really long time. The region which supported million (perhaps even millions) two thousand years ago had less than 150K people around 1400. It won't even double by 1800 and for a good reason: given how arid the region is/was, not tending it constantly made almost all of Palestine into a barren wasteland except a few places like the Valley of Jezreel. It was just a (very) dusty backwater of the Damascus Eyalet of practically zero political importance. That has, of course, changed in more recent history.

Source? How much is "almost everyone". Why bring the Israel discussion into this topic to begin with?

FYI, the Jewish population was almost completely expelled from that region by the year 135 CE.

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