History of plague

[5] That is supported by the discovery of a tomb in modern-day Sweden containing 79 corpses buried within a short time, in which the authors discovered fragments of a unique strain of the plague pathogen Yersinia pestis.

[9][10][11] The First Book of Samuel[12] describes a possible plague outbreak in Philistia, and the Septuagint version says it was caused by a "ravaging of mice".

[13] In the second year of the Peloponnesian War (430 BC), Thucydides described an epidemic disease which was said to have begun in Ethiopia, passed through Egypt and Libya, then come to the Greek world.

Although this epidemic has long been considered an outbreak of plague, many modern scholars believe that typhus,[14] smallpox, or measles may better fit the surviving descriptions.

A recent study of DNA found in the dental pulp of plague victims suggests that typhoid was actually responsible.

[15] In the first century AD, Rufus of Ephesus, a Greek anatomist, refers to an outbreak of plague in Libya, Egypt, and Syria.

He records that Alexandrian doctors named Dioscorides and Posidonius described symptoms including acute fever, pain, agitation, and delirium.

Rufus also wrote that similar buboes were reported by a Dionysius Curtus, who may have practiced medicine in Alexandria in the third century BC.

[citation needed] J. F. Gilliam believes that the Antonine plague probably caused more deaths than any other epidemic during the empire before the mid-3rd century.

[19] It then spread to Africa from where the huge city of Constantinople imported massive amounts of grain, mostly from Egypt, to feed its citizens.

The grain ships were the source of contagion for the city, with massive public granaries nurturing the rat and flea population.

While the swellings in this description have been identified by some as buboes, there is some contention as to whether the pandemic should be attributed to the bubonic plague, Yersinia pestis, known in modern times.

[26] From 1331 to 1351, the Black Death, a massive and deadly pandemic originating in China, spread along the Silk Road and swept through Asia, Europe and Africa.

The first was primarily bubonic and was carried around the world through ocean-going trade, transporting infected persons, rats, and cargoes harboring fleas.

[citation needed] Plague occurred in Russia in 1877–1889 in rural areas near the Ural Mountains and the Caspian Sea.

Significantly, the region of Vetlianka in this area is near a population of the bobak marmot, a small rodent considered a very dangerous plague reservoir.

The last significant Russian outbreak of Plague was in Siberia in 1910 after sudden demand for marmot skins (a substitute for sable) increased the price by 400 percent.

The traditional hunters would not hunt a sick Marmot and it was taboo to eat the fat from under the arm (the axillary lymphatic gland that often harboured the plague) so outbreaks tended to be confined to single individuals.

The price increase, however, attracted thousands of Chinese hunters from Manchuria who not only caught the sick animals but also ate the fat, which was considered a delicacy.

[citation needed] The bubonic plague continued to circulate through different ports globally for the next fifty years; however, it was primarily found in Southeast Asia.

[60] As late as 1897, medical authorities in the European powers organized a conference in Venice, seeking ways to keep the plague out of Europe.

[62] Research done by a team of biologists from the Institute of Pasteur in Paris and Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany by analyzing the DNA and proteins from plague pits, published in October 2010, reported beyond doubt that all 'the three major plagues' were due to at least two previously unknown strains of Yersinia pestis and originated from China.

A team of medical geneticists led by Mark Achtman of University College Cork in Ireland reconstructed a family tree of the bacterium and concluded in an online issue of Nature Genetics published on 31 October 2010 that all three of the great waves of plague originated from China.

Vegetation such as pinyon and juniper trees are thought to support rodents such as the prairie dog and rock squirrel, with their fleas, according to Paul Ettestad of the New Mexico public health department.

The CDC indicates that over the past century, plague in the U.S. has been most common in the areas of northern New Mexico, northwestern Arizona and southern Colorado.

[76] This is almost certainly substantially lower than how the plague propagated during the Black Death pandemic of the fourteenth century with the with living conditions and existing genetic diversity in the human population at that time.