Wednesday 17 January 2018

Black Death 'spread by humans not rats'


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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