Article Source: msnbc.com
from:msnbc.com'Black Death' bacteria likely extinct, study finds
Seeded on Mon Aug 29, 2011 5:49 PM EDT (msnbc.com)
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Given the rate of bacterial mutation, one would naturally assume that that particular "species" (completely useless term to apply to prokaryotes!) that their "realives" are still around! Man versus microbe, the neverending story!
Unless I missed it, the article does not mention rodent control as a preventative. Rat infestations in 3rd world countries are poorly controlled due to unsanitary conditions, but it should be remembered that rodent control in the U.S. is far from perfect. They breed rapidly and have developed resistance to many rodenticides. If you live near a railroad track where large grain shipments are carried go out at night with a powerful flashlight and see rats eating grain spilled along the tracks.
Perhaps the article didn't mention rodent control as a preventative because the topic is not about prevention. The article is about whether the same strain of bacteria that was responsible for Black Death is extinct.
I think Oregon is saying it's possible it's not extinct, due to lack of rodent control. The rodents on the planet could yet be carrying multiple strains, and we just don't know it.
Like there has never been a conversation in Newsvine where someone with an opinion that parallels the main topic in a relative manner has never happened. Geez scales...you need a hug or something? Give Oregon a break...and I do agree with him. Per history vermin were the reason for the spread of the Black Plague so there might be a species that is actually still carrying relatively close versions of the bacteria...which may be why is still spreads in the SW US every few years.
If we want to split hairs, the plague is caused by fleas. Granted, it's the fleas living on the rat...but fleas nonetheless.
achick...while everyone is be picky, I'll join in. The plague is not "caused" by rats or fleas. Fleas on rats carried the bacteria that was the cause of the plague.
Interesting story. I think the germ in question was the likely culprit...my educated guess was that it was a virulent mutant (like the Spanish Flu), and hygiene being poor during the Dark Ages (and no knowledge of germ theory) along with influxes of refugees from the crumbling Byzantine Empire, it made for the perfect storm...a huge die-off.
Flash forward today...although we have modern medicine and by and large decent hygiene, we could be a step away from the next plague. There's 8 billion souls, many living in the Third World. Even here in the good old USA, there could be pockets of infection waiting to break out. If there is one thing we should keep in mind, is that things come in cycles. It was the dinosaurs turn some 65 million years ago...our time could be coming, and our downfall may come in the form of a test tube or a diseased rodent.
A scary, but true, thought. We're predict to double our numbers as a species in a decade or so. What would happen if some vastly contagious, fast acting germ/virus were to break out? With the fact that most people travel farther, quicker, then our ancestors did... it would be catastrophic.
Scary yes....the bacteria that causes the black death...Y. pestis...when it infects your lungs even if you get antibiotics it has about a 97% mortality rate.
That's with the untampered bacteria. Imagine if someone with some scientific background and malice got a hold of it.
"What would happen if some vastly contagious, fast acting germ/virus were to break out?"
It has and it will again. Do you not remember SARS? A strain of coronavirus that jumped from animals to humans in 2003 and could return to the human population again any day.. Although at the time it only had a case mortality rate of 10%, imagine what a mutated stronger version could do. It spread to 37 countries in a matter of weeks.
Fact -
No, I don't remember SARS, I was in, like... 5th grade, haha. I'm only 18. Not your bad, though :) I do remember bird and swine flu, and Mad Cow.
But yeah. Bad stuff will be happening, and probably soon. There's a huge divide between rich countries and poor ones, and when you stick a bunch of people, too poor for proper medical care together... well. We already know what happens.
I am always reminded of a warren of rabbits. When ever there get to be too many they start to get sick and die off. There are a lot of us on the planet today.
Nature will always strive for the prefect balance.
From what the people involved said it didn't really sound like they put anything to bed just came up with a plausible explanation. Bad writing by the article's author.
Atrocious writing and misleading headline. The headline suggests that the bacteria that was responsible for the Black Death is extinct, but the article turns around and says that a close variation of that bacteria still exists. If the bacteria were truly dead, one would expect that the plague is no longer in existence, but then the reader is informed that pockets still exist, including the in the Southwest USA.
Very confusing article. Never reached a final conclusion. Sloppy writing.
Now watch, in the next couple years, one of these scientists who can't leave well enough alone, will find the bacteria alive on one of these bodies they are studying. His curiosity will get the better of him and next thing you know we'll have a new super-bacterial warfare agent. Why? Cause these so called intelligent people just have to study it. Why? Cause it's there. Certain things should best be left alone, you know, things like a bacteria that wiped out nearly a quarter of the earth's population.
Actually, we HAVE the tech to make a supergerm essentially from scratch...either virus or bacterium. And the genie is out of the bottle...happened with the Atom Bomb, it happened with computer viruses. The best we can do is hope the folks in charge treat this seriously, like the anthrax attacks.
Uh, computer viruses don't kill people.
They can if they hit the right computers, scales.
MrEd, we need to study events like this from the past to better understand what threats lie out there. If no one ever studied anything potentially threatening to life we would still be dying from plague and many other illnesses thinking it was due to a sin we had committed or due to something our parents did.
Similarly if no one ever exercised their curiosity about something that happened to be there we wouldn't have this lovely forum on which to debate.
But computers can. How many people have become fat, lazy and sick because of lack of exercise atrophying behind a computer? Their immune system is destroyed they get sick, various diseases and end up having a much shorter life. So actually... computer viruses DO kill.
@TJW
I understand learning about it, ok, so they believe it to be extinct, leave it that way. But some overly educated idiot out there will just have to see if he can "improve" on nature and make this thing worse. Some people just can't leave well enough alone. Hopefully I'm wrong and it will never happen, unfortunately I am usually proven right in the long run.
@Real Life
Your reply is almost laughable except that you show that you completely and totally missed the point. But then I am not surprised, very few people actually read what they read and jump to idiotic conclusions based entirely on the need to be confrontational, you would be case in point. Besides, there are many out there that would argue that all the advances you mentioned have done more harm than good, I'm not one of them, but they're out there.
Uh....being a researcher who has spent time *currently* studying Y. pestis I'd have to disagree with "historian" scientists...
Any evolutionary biology I've seen points to Y. pestis coming to it's "age" around ten thousand years ago. Long before the Black Death plague. There have been a few genetic variants since but none that are radically different. Personally I fear two biogical agents in their current state--that would be Y. pestis and of course smallpox.
Also keep in mind that attenuated *mild, lab adapted and supposedly safe* strains have killed researchers, the most recently I know of being a seasoned scientist in Chicago about two years ago.
I really do not like pseudo-science. WTH?
cite me some articles that talk about Y. pestis "coming of age" and I'll believe you're a microbiologist.
However, I do agree with you that supposedly safe strains of bacteria can occasionally cause illness and do sometimes mutate again into more harmful strains.
Elemental: are you calling the evolution comment pseudoscience or the whole comment above?
I was referring to the article. Such a joke.
Was that all you got out of this story. A reason to bash Scientists?
More like pseudo-scientists.
For those of you that haven't figured it out, eleMENTAL is a science basher and if you try to get any sort of explanation from him as to why he hates science, he'll continue throwing unsubstantiated claims at you and move on to the next vine.
I have a hypothesis that he wanted be a scientist but due to his inability to understand anything he failed so now his goal is to bash the very thing he wished he could be.
Which one of the commandments says not to envy thy neighbor?
Lol....Hairyboy.
Correction, I am a pseudo-science basher.
Is it so hard for you pseudo-science pushers to understand true facts?
Point in case, right there.
He'll continue to call it pseudo science yet he refuses to explain why (because he literally lacks the mental capacity to do so).
Posters will provide evidence to refute his claims, he wont acknowledge those posts, he'll just continue to bash the study and the whole field of evolutionary biology.
Nothing can be gained through responding to his posts.
In this thread alone he provides four criticisms without any reason or factual support! The same thing over and over again...
The lab strain was attenuated in iron acquisition pathways, and the researcher had hemochromatosis. Excess iron allowed the lab strain to become virulent: a very unfortunate coincidence that illustrates how the prevalence of some relatively mild condition could make a person particularly susceptible to a "harmless" bug. Many times, we don't know what mutations have occurred during passaging of lab strains or even vaccine strains to make them different from their virulent cousins.
if you're responding to a comment above, it's helpful to use the "reply" button so your comment stays attached the the subdiscussion in question.
Regarding the comment about not knowing the mutations that occur in labs and vaccine strains, you're wrong, these can be sequenced today. It's not like the 1950's where we didn't have molecular biology on the scale we do today.
This article makes no sense at all. It says the virus is extinct, and it says it is alive today. It says it is different from the one today, then it says there is no difference. Who the hell wrote this garbage?
It isn't a virus.
The writer obviously felt it was unnecessary to write "the particular strain of" before each instance of the quoted phrase.
They did clear it up, but obviously 90% of Newsvine posters either cannot comprehend that the same bacteria may appear in a variety of strains or simply cannot keep that bit of information in mind while reading the article unless it is repeated for them in every other sentence.
The article also never said there is "no difference" between the ancient and present-day strains. It quoted the study author saying:
Some segments (being a part, not the whole) of the DNA were identical, implying that other segments differed. In other words, the strains as a whole are not identical, only some portions of their DNA are.
The whole reason the researcher mentioned it was simply to say "we cannot [...] make any claims as to difference in epidemiology between current and ancient strains." This is basically just the typical scientific caveat, "This is what we think, but we can't be 100% certain."
The title is totally misleading. Yersinia pestis was the bacteria causing the Black Death. It's still doing it. The Black Death bacterium is not extinct. The very specific strain of Yersinia pestis might be extinct. Might be.
Let's try to keep science reporting credible, please. There's enough refusal to accept scientific findings, already. Don't encourage it.
i agree with you steely, but it's already been said above, please try to read the above comments before starting your own thread.
'Titanic' likely unsinkable, study finds.
Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann and Rich Perry are all full of Black Death or maybe just another form of it.
Wow, some people will find a way to bring politics into anything.
Go away Troll
MSNBC must have a stable of "fill" writers who make up stories from the first page of a google search. A couple weeks ago Yahoo ran a story on Wednesday that corn prices were going down because of lower demand. The very NEXT day they ran "corn prices up" because of crop failures, ethanol, blah blah blah.
No worries about the Black Death! They've developed a vaccine and nobody knows if it's safe or not or what's in it but we'd better line up for it right away because we know Big Pharma is on top of it and won't even get sued if people die from it.
The big question is how the bubonic plague and black death bacteria were carried on Noah's ark.
agreed Johnnie... add to that gonorrhea, chlamydia, HIV, syphillis, influenza, RSV, metapneumovirus, parainfluenza, anthrax, ebola, ... oh heck, the whole list of virulent organisms that effect humans. Many of which affect humans alone. Might have been hard to shovel all the animal dung, keep the lions away from the gazelles, and feed every animal on board if the handful of humans were already busy playing host to their own illnesses.
maybe the microbes were kept in the special cryogenic containers stored in the aft section, near the nuclear power generator.
How could you not know that already, genius.
The conclusion of all research is "more research is needed".
Maybe if they had tested 101 samples instead of 100, they would have discovered something ENTIRELY DIFFERENT, right? ;)
Job security?
Decelsior, maybe one million years from now we will be conducting our last experiment and instead of "more research is needed" it will conclude with 'DONE, we now know everything about the universe.'
Until then more research will be needed.
if research like this was a money making endeavor then colleges would be turning out a lot more researchers.
How the "black death" started is uncertain, but the spread was no doubt a direct result of early Christianity's bizarre rejection of sanitation and hygiene as pagan, and ignorant beliefs that cats were satanic. This may have been the first time organized religion nearly wiped out the human race, but I fear it may not be the last.
Bubonic plaque? What is that? A new and deadly gum disease?
It's not extinct.... -_- It's just mutated.
Oh come on now...it evolved. ;P
Same thing, silly. lol
Y. pestis is not "extinct." That is a misleading term. The bacteria has mutated, or more properly, evolved, over the centuries, it would seem. It is also likely that human's immune systems have developed a natural, inherited resistance to the "black death." It makes sense that a natural selection process took place then, so that those resistant to plague are the ones who passed on their genes.
Given the propensity for species "long-thought extinct" to occasionally be found in some unexpected place, I wouldn't write off the version that killed off so much of Europe's population in the 14th C. Even if not found in some natural setting, I agree with earlier posters who state that some egghead will someday opt to attempt to reverse engineer the virus, even if under the guise of 'research'.
Then again, viruses have repeatedly come in & wiped out populations every few centuries. So some new strain might come in & follow in the footsteps of Y. pestis, Influenza 1918, etc.
This is stupid. Surely everyone knows that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) keeps a sample of EVERY bacteria and virus known to science. That includes the Black Death, people. And let's not forget the military biowarfare divisions...
Somebody slap the author(s) of the study, please. Make them stop using nonsensical sources.
Good. There's way too many people on this planet. What the world needs is a good plaque to wipe out 80-90% of the population.
I know tooth decay is bad, mkay.. but it's not THAT bad
I think it was recreated in another image of itself!
The incoherent writing of this article, combined with the low reading comprehension skills of the average Newsvine reader leads to mass confusion of all.