Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956
How humans survived the plague for millenia
One of civilization's most prolific killers shadowed humans for thousands of years without their knowledge.
The bacteria Yersinia pestis, which causes the plague, is thought to be responsible for up to 200 million deaths across human history — more than twice the casualties of World War II.
The Y. pestis death toll comes from three widespread disease outbreaks, known as epidemics: the sixth century Justinianic Plague that ravaged the Eastern Roman Empire; the 14th century Black Death that killed somewhere between 40 percent and 60 percent of the European population; and the ongoing Third Pandemic, which began in China in the mid-19th century and currently afflicts thousands worldwide.
Scientists long assumed that the deadly disease began infecting humans just before the earliest epidemic, the Justinianic Plague.
But recent paleogenetics research reveals that plague has been with us for millennia longer: Ancient DNA (aDNA) from the bacteria was recovered from human skeletons as old as 4,900 years. This means people were contracting and dying from plague at least 3,000 years before there's any archaeological or historical evidence for an epidemic.
Why didn't these earlier infections lead to devastating outbreaks like the Black Death? It seems the answer is part biological — genetic mutations to the bacteria itself — and part cultural — changes to human lifestyles that encouraged the spread of the disease.
[...] The harsh reality is that it's exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to control a pathogen, its possible mutations or its next outbreak. But understanding how human behaviors affect the spread and virulence of a disease can inform preparations for the future.
As a society, we can take organized measures to reduce the spread of infection, whether by limiting over-congestion, controlling food waste, or restricting access to contaminated areas. Human behaviors are just as critical to our disease susceptibility as are the characteristics of the pathogen itself.
This article is republished from The Conversation by Sonja Eliason, MPhil Candidate in Bioscience Enterprise, University of Cambridge and Bridget Alex, Lecturer, California State University, Long Beach under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 24 2019, @02:04AM (5 children)
Millenia
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 24 2019, @02:06AM (1 child)
Don't worry, they'll get it right when they repost in a few days.
(Score: 4, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday November 24 2019, @02:09AM
That's what you think. Our editors are highly trained to cmn32480's exacting standards of speeling.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Informative) by janrinok on Sunday November 24 2019, @10:43AM (2 children)
We do NOT change quoted sources. Otherwise we are responsible for whatever is being stated, and that could lead us into all sorts of legal problems.
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 24 2019, @04:22PM (1 child)
Have some personal responsibility doooood!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 24 2019, @08:50PM
Are you offering to cover legal expenses, dooood?
(Score: 3, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday November 24 2019, @02:07AM (9 children)
vs.
I think someone needs to look up the words "epidemic" and "pandemic" then recategorize the current situation to something more appropriate. I suggest "yawnfest".
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday November 24 2019, @03:54AM (7 children)
Without modern medicine, the current global pandemic would be quite a bit more serious.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 24 2019, @03:58AM
Ethanol-HIV-fueled should be dead from AIDS long ago.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday November 24 2019, @02:18PM (5 children)
Point was "thousands worldwide" ain't exactly a pandemic or even an epidemic. Not even if it's the plague or smallpox. It's more of a nothingburger.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday November 24 2019, @02:33PM (2 children)
By that metric, Leprosy was kind of a nothingburger even before it was treatable... it is interesting to wonder what causes these flareups in human susceptibility to plague, seems like it would be more than living conditions, but maybe there's a critical threshold where it transitions from an annoying nothingburger into overwhelming the majority of peoples' immune systems.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday November 24 2019, @02:37PM (1 child)
Oh it's interesting enough, it just doesn't warrant the clickbait naming.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday November 24 2019, @02:50PM
Clickbait is here to stay, it's like the demon spawn of junk mail and TV advertising.
I wonder how long it will be before there are algorithms which can filter the click bait from the content presented in your searches?
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 24 2019, @08:56PM (1 child)
How does the old saw go? "A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when *you* lose your job."
I'm sure it's a "nothingburger" for you, but not so much for the thousands who suffer from Yersinia Pestis. Even if you don't die, it's painful and really disgusting.
And while I'm not real broken up about it, especially since no one I know is affected, I can still sympathize with the folks who are, and would like to see this scourge controlled better than it is today.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday November 24 2019, @10:35PM
Scourge would be fine as well but even epidemic isn't remotely accurate unless it's all in one town.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday November 24 2019, @09:43AM
The plague is alive and well [azcentral.com] in Flagstaff, Arizona. When I lived there as a tiny kid it was always all over the news, but not in reality enough of a big deal to give a fuck. It wasn't till years later after living somewhere else where I learned about the Black Death and had that "a-ha, holy shit!" moment.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by black6host on Sunday November 24 2019, @02:57AM (4 children)
From the article:
And we have someone saying in a book reviewed at the NY Times:
https://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/06/books/chapters/what-every-person-should-know-about-war.html [nytimes.com]
Now, I don't know who this Chris Hedges is but I am convinced I'd rather not die of the plague, or war. Think I'll opt for old age.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 24 2019, @03:46AM
Live fast, die young, leave a hedonist corpse.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 24 2019, @04:00AM
He's a journalist and Presbyterian minister. You can read him at TruthDig [truthdig.com].
(Score: 3, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday November 24 2019, @02:25PM (1 child)
I'll pass on that, thanks. I want to die of a direct meteor strike while simultaneously getting a blowjob from Catherine Bach and landing a flathead catfish that beats the world record by thirty pounds.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Sunday November 24 2019, @03:09PM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Arik on Sunday November 24 2019, @03:37AM (10 children)
Deadly diseases tend to wipe out their hosts too quickly to go global, in a hunter-gatherer eon. Which most of them were.
There were occasional plagues but they killed themselves off, leaving ghost-lands for future generations to move into. And the stories they left were thus not tales of disease, but tales of powerful ancestors or land-spirits or whatever who once walked these lands before, who built this and that, who maybe had an unusual artistic style.
What changed this was urbanization. Waste disposal lagged significantly behind waste creation.
I'm presuming most of my readers are from Europe, North America, or Australia; so for the most part you're used to some particularly advanced forms of waste disposal. And probably not used to having rats infest the buildings where you live and work.
Imagine living in a city without those advantages. And then imagine how much worse it would be if instead of internal combustion engines and electric motors you had to move everything with horse and oxen. Which produce their own characteristic forms of pollution.
A large and unsanitary population concentrated in one area provides the infectious disease an opportunity to really mutate. Ideally it wants to find a form that doesn't kill the host off too quickly. This is often assisted by the evolution of some form of immunity in the host. Then the disease can establish itself long term, in a symbiotic relationship. When the hosts encounter others of their species lacking immunity, the disease will do much of the bloody work for them.
None of this could happen before urbanization.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday November 24 2019, @03:56AM (3 children)
To me, one of the most impressive stories out of the bird flu back around 2003 was that apartment building where basically everybody in it contracted the flu - apparently the plumbing had an unwanted but nonetheless present connection between the sanitary sewer and the drinking water....
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 24 2019, @04:10AM
I prefer the swine flu from 2009. I was working with a lot of Chinese people back then who all ate pork and who all spread swine flu to everyone around them. Swine flu was entertaining to have because it felt so different from the common flu. I remember doing a lot of dry heaving while I had it.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Sunday November 24 2019, @03:06PM (1 child)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday November 24 2019, @05:52PM
Well thought out regulations balance the cost of a $20 installation of a $5 backflow preventer on every one of 100 million outside garden hose attachments against the real incidence of system depressurizations causing siphon-backflows of bacteria laden water into the potable water supply system against both the costs of increased illnesses (and occasional deaths) that result and the cost of increased treatment by chlorine, etc. (not only the cost of the chemicals, but also the disease they cause when used long term in higher concentrations)...
In the real world, proposed regulations purport to be well thought out, but whether they get implemented or not is much more a political decision driven more by opportunity to "address the crisis" of a recent outbreak or some-such making the elected officials look good to the voters - luckily for us the two have a fairly positive correlation, so at least we're moving in the correct direction, most of the time.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Sunday November 24 2019, @04:11AM (3 children)
It's not quite that simple, and the primary host for plague is various rodents, not humans. And the rodents are a lot less damaged by the plague than humans are.
Another factor, of course, is population density. Denser populations allow more contagious diseases to spread without worrying about whether they are killing off their host too quickly.
So the main way people survived the plague is by living in small scattered groups that couldn't pass the disease on. Long distance trade routes were a big weakness in that strategy, but we wouldn't expect to find records before writing. This new discovery shouldn't surprise anyone, but it's evidence that hadn't been found before.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by Arik on Sunday November 24 2019, @04:21AM (1 child)
"Denser populations allow more contagious diseases to spread without worrying [quite so much] about whether they are killing off their host too quickly."
FTFY.
"So the main way people survived the plague is by living in small scattered groups that couldn't pass the disease on."
No, no, no.
No.
If that were true, the Siberian/American/Australian/Andaman/etc. aboriginals would be the majority now.
In fact, though many of them died, the populations that just kept sacrificing people eventually benefited from carrying the plagues.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Sunday November 24 2019, @04:56PM
You're misunderstanding the way resistance evolves in a population. If is disease if too dangerous, most of the population needs to be isolated from it, and small groups exposed. The survivors from those small groups interbreed with the main population carrying the resistance genes. These allow the population to gather various different modes of resistance without excessive die-off.
Groups that aren't exposed at all, i.e. reproductively isolated, don't gather the genes for resistance.
So what you need to evolve resistance is a widely dispersed population of relatively small clusters that occasionally interbreed. Over time this decreases the deadliness of the disease, by spreading genes for resistance.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 24 2019, @03:47PM
Nah... the plague was always around but would only cause epidemics during times of mass scurvy. People really underestimate what the discovery that citrus protected against scurvy did for humanity.
(Score: 3, Informative) by ChrisMaple on Sunday November 24 2019, @03:47PM (1 child)
The Roman Republic/Empire is well known for its water and sewage systems, and public baths. Christianity rejected what it viewed as corrupt and immoral Roman culture, including bathing. As Christianity came to dominate the Empire, this was an open invitation to catastrophic contagious diseases.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 24 2019, @04:01PM
How does this explain why the plague would only be a problem every now and then vs always?
(Score: 1) by jmc23 on Monday November 25 2019, @12:01AM (1 child)
God wouldn't have invented the plague if he just gave Moses what he asked for.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 25 2019, @07:39AM
Quid Pro Mo