By Victoria GillScience correspondent, BBC
News
15 January 2018
Rats were not to blame for the spread of
plague during the Black Death, according to a study.
The rodents and their fleas were thought to
have spread a series of outbreaks in 14th-19th Century Europe.
But a team from the universities of Oslo and
Ferrara now says the first, the Black Death, can be "largely ascribed to
human fleas and body lice".
The study, in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Science, uses records of its pattern and scale.
The Black Death claimed an estimated 25
million lives, more than a third of Europe's population, between 1347 and 1351.
"We have good mortality data from
outbreaks in nine cities in Europe," Prof Nils Stenseth, from the
University of Oslo, told BBC News.
"So we could construct models of the
disease dynamics [there]."
He and his colleagues then simulated disease
outbreaks in each of these cities, creating three models where the disease was
spread by:
rats
airborne transmission
fleas and lice that live on humans and their
clothes
In seven out of the nine cities studied, the
"human parasite model" was a much better match for the pattern of the
outbreak.
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