Yersinia Pestis Quotes

Just as not all butterflies produce a hurricane, not all outbreaks of bubonic plague produce a Renaissance.

minuscule bacteria known as yersinia pestis. Even seven centuries ago diseases liked to use the latest improvements in human transportation to introduce themselves to new hosts.

a million different theories exist as to the weaponization of most diseases so let’s start at the top. In the case of any bioterrorist event involving plague, the healthcare system of a region will be easily overwhelmed. Yes, I said will. Especially if strict isolation is implemented indiscriminately for most patients. The Yersinia pestis virus can be destroyed with drying, heat and ultraviolet light, making weaponization a very tricky process.

In June 1894, working independently and competitively, the French and Japanese microbiologists Alexandre Yersin (1863–1943) and Shibasaburo Kitasato (1853–1931) almost simultaneously identified Yersinia pestis as the pathogen responsible for bubonic plague.

As in all pre-industrial mortality crises, it would have been quite normal for large numbers to flee the towns at the onset of an epidemic, and on this occasion such a response would have been entirely rational, for the impact of the plague was far more severe in confined and congested environments where rats (or whatever actually was the vector of the deadly bacterium Yersinia pestis) could breed and move freely around.

Si chiamano così. Per esteso: Yersinia pestis. Qualità: bacillo pestigeno. Professione: historical killer. Numero di vittime: parecchie decine di milioni. Movente: castigo.

three varieties of plague are caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, they present differently.

Nineteen teeth from twelve sixth-century plague pits in Aschheim near Munich provided the source of the Code of Justinian. In among the ancient human DNA are the remnants of other species that loiter around our bodies. A 2013 study ground out DNA from those teeth and found without doubt the same Yersinia pestis we see today. This had settled a long running debate about whether that great plague was in fact bubonic.

Krause and his team unearthed the evolution of Yersinia pestis, and the genomic tracks of its terrible journey. An earlier study had shown that, just like the Plague of Justinian, the Black Death in the 1340s had also originated in China. With a publicly available database of the full sequence, the history and the genetics can be aligned. Over a five-year period we can track a course from Russia to Constantinople, to Messina, to Genoa, Marseille, Bordeaux, and finally London. All these ports acted as points from which radiation of the plague could crawl inland. En route, it claimed the lives of some 5 million people.

Within the region of DNA that was apparently undergoing evolution in response to the plague is a family of genes with typically clunky names.* They’re called Toll-like receptors, or TLRs, and the proteins they encode sit on the surface of immune cells such as those hungry macrophages and sentinel cells. There they vigilantly await the advent of microbes with very specific markings. Upon identification of such an invader, an immune klaxon goes off, and the innate army of cells that protect us from within is activated. TLRs 1, 2, 6, and 10 are the combination that recognizes Yersinia pestis, and there they are, as a cluster, sitting right in that zone that has subtly but measurably evolved in Romas and Romanians, but not in the rest of the world. The mark of the plague is in our genes.

It was precisely the existence of trans-Eurasian trade routes that enabled the bacterium Yersinia pestis to kill so many fourteenth-century Europeans. Likewise, European expansion overseas, beginning roughly a century and a half later, led to the so-called Columbian Exchange: pathogens brought by Europeans devastated indigenous American populations; Europeans then brought back syphilis from the New World; and by shipping enslaved Africans to the Caribbean and the Americas, Europeans also brought malaria and yellow fever to those places.

Despite the fear evoked by the idea of genetically modified organisms, those of the natural variety are hard to beat when it comes to posing serious threats to humanity. Yersinia pestis, the causative agent of bubonic plague, is estimated to have killed as many as a third to a half of all Europeans in the Black Death epidemic of the mid-fourteenth century. The bacterium made a comeback appearance in the Great Plague, another wave of annihilation that swept through the Continent in 1665–1666.

Medical historians believe the sickness began in China in 1331. Along with a civil war, it halved the Chinese population. From there, the plague moved along trade routes of Asia and arrived in the Crimea fifteen years later, in 1346. Then it entered Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. It disrupted society in ways eerily reminiscent of the Athens plague so long before. It emptied streets and public places like the flu epidemic that followed it. And its very name became emblematic of the horrors of epidemics. It was known as the Black Death. At the time the illness was as mysterious as the plague of Athens but now it is known that the Black Death bacteria, Yersinia pestis, were spread by fleas that lived on black rats. The rats, in turn, moved from port to port on ships, taking the illness with them. The fleas would bite people, infecting them with the bacteria. The plague would not have been so overwhelming if it could only spread through flea bites. It turned out that once the bacteria began infecting people, they found another way of spreading. They would infect the lungs and cause a pneumonia, whereupon sick people could infect the healthy simply by coughing or sneezing.

By probing the full sequence of the London plague for the very first time, geneticist Johannes Krause and his team unearthed the evolution of Yersinia pestis [the Plague microbe], and the genomic tracks of its terrible journey. An earlier study had shown that, just like the Plague of Justinian, the Black Death in the 1340s had also originated in China. With a publicly available database of the full sequence, the history and the genetics can be aligned. Over a five-year period we can track a course from Russia to Constantinople, to Messina, to Genoa, Marseille, Bordeaux, and finally London. All these ports acted as points from which radiation of the plague could crawl inland. En route, it claimed the lives of some 5 million people. Just as in the Byzantine Empire 600 years earlier, wave after wave of outbreak crashed into Britain’s population in the centuries after the fourteenth, and it was only after the Great Fire of London in 1666 that this pandemic was crushed. Krause’s work also shows that it never really went away. The pandemic might have ended, but the strains of Yersinia that cause bubonic plague outbreaks to this day are identical.