Ancient World Review

How Yersinia Pestis Evolved To Cause Pneumonic Plague

Pneumonic plague, a particularly nasty form of the disease, spreads very quickly. Untreated, it has a mortality rate of almost 100 percent, according to Wikipedia, and "[s]ome hypothesize that the pneumonic version of the plague was mainly responsible for the Black Death that resulted in approximately 50 million deaths in the 1300s."

Report from 2017.

There are three different strains of the plague and it's possible that they were all involved in the Black Death along with several other diseases:

"Many scholars arguing for Y. pestis as the major agent of the pandemic suggest that its extent and symptoms can be explained by a combination of bubonic plague with other diseases, including typhus, smallpox and respiratory infections. In addition to the bubonic infection, others point to additional septicemic (a type of 'blood poisoning') and pneumonic (an airborne plague that attacks the lungs before the rest of the body) forms of the plague, which lengthen the duration of outbreaks throughout the seasons and help account for its high mortality rate and additional recorded symptoms."

The Secret Of The Black Death

The Black Death peaked in Europe in 1348-1350 and by the time it was over, the "Great Mortality" had killed something like 25 million people--one-third of Europe's population at the time. In some places, it wiped out so many people that the authorities had to outlaw the ringing of church bells at funerals because the ringing never stopped. Entire villages disappeared into plague pits and bishops were sometimes forced to consecrate rivers so they could be used to dump the bodies. The exact number of fatalities is still a matter of conjecture, but there's no doubt that the Black Death was one of the worst natural disasters in human history.

Image: detail from The Triumph of Death (1562) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

"According to the Foster scale, a kind of Richter scale of human disaster, the medieval plague is the second greatest catastrophe in the human record. Only World War II produced more death, physical destruction, and emotional suffering, says Canadian geographer Harold D. Foster, the scale's inventor." --"The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time," by John Kelly. P.11.

No one knows where the Black Death came from exactly, but it's generally agreed that it "originated somewhere in inner Asia and spread westward to the Middle East and Europe and eastward to China along the international trade routes." (The Great Mortality, p.7) In other words, the spread of the pestilence was accelerated by a medieval form of globalism which brought Europe into contact with a lot of different cultures--something to keep in mind these days when air travel and open borders make it possible to spread diseases from one corner of the world to another in a matter of hours.

The Mongols picked up the disease on the steppes of Asia and brought it to Europe through trade and war. In 1346, during their siege of the Crimean city of Caffa, they were said to have catapulted the bodies of their own plague victims into the city--an early example of biological warfare if it actually happened. Once the Black Death caught hold, Genoese merchant ships--the notorious "plague ships"--carried it to ports throughout Europe, their holds full of merchandise, infected sailors and rats crawling with the fleas which carried the plague bacillus: Yersinia pestis, aka Y. pestis. No one understood the connection between fleas, rats and plague at the time, however. They thought the Great Mortality was the result of astrological alignments, foul air, the wrath of God and Jews poisoning their wells.

The pestilence itself apparently consisted of three different types of plague: bubonic plague -- transmitted by flea bites with a two-to-six-day incubation period; pneumonic plague -- a fast-acting and highly contagious form of the disease which attacks the lungs and can be spread like the common cold through the air; and the lethal septicemic plague, which floods the bloodstream with plague bacilli and kills everyone who gets it. According to Kelly, "during one outbreak of septicemic plague in the early 20th century, the average survival time from onset of symptoms to death was 14.5 hours." (The Great Mortality, p.22)

The Black Death spread so quickly--modern plague is fairly slow--that some scientists have speculated that it wasn't plague at all, but a form of anthrax or hemorrhagic fever similar to Ebola, or some kind of extinct disease unknown to science. The consensus view, however, is that it was a particularly virulent ancestor of the modern bubonic plague. Whatever it was, it raced through Europe in an incredibly short period of time, wiping out millions and creating massive social upheavals.

The effects of this calamity were enormous.

Before the Black Death, medieval Europe was in a state of decline and stagnation. The feudal system was locked in place, the church corrupt and despotic, medicine and science crippled by religion and superstition. The population was very low by today's standards, but the number of people had grown to the point where it was putting a strain on available resources. The Black Death broke this stalemate by killing off a third of the population, driving up labor costs and forcing social reforms and technical innovations that played a large role in the Reformation.

"In the fifty years after the Black Death, the medieval world's traditional economic winners and losers exchanged places. The new losers, the landed gentry, began to see their wealth shredded by the scissors of low food prices and high labor costs; the new winners, the people at the bottom, saw their one marketable asset--labor--increase dramatically in value, and with it their standard of living rise." The Great Mortality, p. 285.

The depopulation brought about by the Black Death led to technological innovations like the invention of the printing press. The shortage of men for the armies led to new developments in firearms like the musket and cannon. The church's inability to respond to the crisis seriously damaged its prestige, leading to the emergence of new "heretical" movements like the anti-clerical Lollards and a general longing for a more personal religious experience. Medicine started using more scientific methods. Public health systems were created. New colleges were founded. Women began to move into the work force, taking over businesses previously run by their husbands who had died in the outbreak. The disaster played a huge role in the rejuvenation of Europe.

And that's the secret of the Black Death. Demographic collapses like this can be beneficial. "Mortality has its advantages," according to The Plague, a great documentary from the History Channel. For example, if you want to improve wages for the lower class, one of the most direct ways to accomplish this is to kill off a third of them. This will drive up wages for the survivors by creating a major labor shortage and turn the social system on its head. Natural catastrophes are one of the main engines of historical transformation. In the final analysis, the Black Death was a good thing because it helped to destroy a corrupt, dead-end culture dominated by the Catholic Church, facilitating the rebirth of Western Civilization.

Ancient, Unknown Strain Of Plague Discovered In 5,000-Year-Old Tomb In Sweden

"In a nearly 5,000-year-old tomb in Sweden, researchers have discovered the oldest-known strain of the notorious bacterium Yersinia pestis — the microbe responsible for humanity's perhaps most-feared contagion: the plague." Source: Live Science.

"The finding suggests that the germ may have devastated settlements across Europe at the end of the Stone Age in what may have been the first major pandemic of human history. It could also rewrite some of what we know of ancient European history."

Note: "The researchers discovered the previously unknown strain of plague in the remains of a woman at the Frälsegården site [1]. Carbon dating suggested she died about 4,900 years ago during a period known as the Neolithic Decline, when Neolithic cultures throughout Europe mysteriously dwindled."

[1] I couldn't find anything about this site in English, but I think it's located in the Falkoping region in eastern Sweden. According to Wikipedia, "Falköping or Falbygden (when meaning the agricultural landscape in which Falköping is located) is widely known for its ancient remains of Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age. ... The location has been inhabited since the end of the ice age and cultivated by people for the last 6000 years."

Also see: An Ancient Strain of Plague May Have Led to the Decline of Neolithic Europeans

Bacteria Causing Medieval Black Death Extinct? (2011)

"The bacteria that caused the Black Death, which wiped out millions in mid-14th century Europe, may be extinct, according to a new study." Source: Live Science (2011).

"Hoping to resolve some controversy regarding the cause of the Black Death, researchers examined more than 100 samples taken from bodies buried in London during that time.

"'The Black Death was caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis — the one responsible for current plague outbreaks. This settles the controversy surrounding the causative agent. Although we cannot rule out, at this stage, that there was another co-circulating strain,' said study author Hendrik Poinar, a biological anthropologist at McMaster University in Ontario.

"However, the genetic sequence of the bacteria in the London bodies differed from the sequences of modern versions of Y. pestis, suggesting that the strain responsible for the Black Death is likely extinct, the researchers said."

Black-Death Survey Reveals Incredible Devastation Wrought By Plague (2016)

Video from 2015.

"The devastation wrought by the Black Death plague pandemic in medieval England has been revealed in a uniquely detailed archaeological study carried out for more than a decade with the help of thousands of village volunteers." Source: Live Science (2016).

The scale of the death and suffering caused by the most well-known outbreak of the Black Death is almost impossible to conceive, but there were earlier outbreaks which were just as deadly. According to Live Science (2014), "[m]any centuries before the Black Death wiped out a third to half of Europe, an equally virulent pandemic called the Plague of Justinian killed upwards of 100 million people in just two short years between 541 and 543 A.D."

The Plague of Justinian spread incredibly quickly and it was just the beginning. Transmitted by rats that accompanied grain shipments from Egypt, "[t]he plague arrived in Constantinople in 542 CE, almost a year after the disease first made its appearance in the outer provinces of the[Byzantine empire]. The outbreak continued to sweep throughout the Mediterranean world for another 225 years, finally disappearing in 750 CE."

Plague Researcher Charged With Murder In 2017

The lecturer in this video is Wyndham Lathem, a former microbiologist at Northwestern University who apparently specialized in the study of the plague bacteria, Yersinia Pestis. Back in 2015, he released the results of a study showing that a small genetic change in the bacillus may have unleashed the deadly disease on the world:

"While studying Yersinia pestis, the bacteria responsible for epidemics of plague such as the Black Death, Wyndham Lathem, Ph.D., assistant professor in microbiology-immunology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, found a single small genetic change that fundamentally influenced the evolution of the deadly pathogen, and thus the course of human history." Source: Archaeology News Network (2015).

As it turns out, Lathem was charged with murder last year. According to The Scientist (Aug. 24, 2017), it was a brutal killing. The body of the victim, a 26-year-old man named Trenton James Cornell-Duranleau, "was found in Lathem’s apartment ... stabbed dozens of times." Lathem fled to California with another man, " a University of Oxford employee from the United Kingdom visiting the States." The two later turned themselves in and Lathem was extradited to Chicago, where he was jailed after bond was denied. I'm not sure where the case stands right now.

Now I'm not particularly interested in this alleged murder. The vicious nature of the killing (stabbing suggests rage) and the fact that Lathem and his companion allegedly just panicked afterward and fled, leaving the body lying around in Lathem's apartment, strongly suggests that the alleged murder was a run-of-the-mill crime of passion. It's also possible that Lathem and his friend are completely innocent. What do I know?

The interesting part of the story is the research Lathem was doing. More specifically, what kind of research was he doing? As explained in the news report above, he was hoping to go to work for the Pasteur Institute but the French government refused to give him the necessary security clearance, which raises the question of why he needed a security clearance to work at the institute in the first place.

I'm not suggesting some kind of conspiracy theory here. Lathem probably needed a security clearance because he would have had access to pathogens at his new job. That seems like the most likely explanation. The Pasteur Institute probably keeps (for medical research purposes) stockpiles of the plague and every other lethal bug known to Man. I'm not sure why he was denied clearance. Maybe the French government turned him down for political reasons. Who knows?

It's possible, I suppose, that Lathem, a plague expert, was involved in some way with biological warfare research, maybe for defensive purposes. It's also possible, of course, that he was doing purely scientific research that might have been used to develop or improve biological weapons if it fell into the wrong hands.  Pure science and weapons development tend to overlap in many fields -- physics and nuclear weapons, for example -- and that seems to be the case with the study of lethal diseases.

Lathem was involved, tangentially at least, with the whole issue of biological warfare. According to The Scientist,  he "had a successful career as an independent investigator, including participating in recent scientific conferences on chemical and biological terrorism defense." For example, he was one of the guest speakers at the 2017 "Gordon Research Conference "Innovation and Advancement: Fundamental Science Resulting in Next-Gen Solutions for Chemical and Biological Threats."

The fact that Lathem spoke at this conference doesn't prove anything at all. There's nothing sinister about it. I have absolutely no evidence that he was involved in biological warfare research and there is no reason to believe that the murder he was charged with committing was anything more than an ordinary murder. That's all irrelevant, anyway. The thing about this case that bothers me is that I can't help wondering how many scientists are out there -- on all sides -- who are doing research, either directly or indirectly, that could lead to the development of new and improved forms of weaponized Black Death.

Governments have been working on this kind of thing for a long time.

Terrorists are apparently looking for ways to use to plague against the West and they're perfectly capable of actually doing it. And who knows how many countries and private institutions are stockpiling this deadly disease that may have killed half of Europe's population during the Middle Ages? North Korea supposedly has its own supply and I'm sure the US, Russia, China and just about everybody else have stockpiles ready to be deployed. Most of these countries probably aren't crazy enough to actually release the plague, but what if it escapes from one of the labs where scientists like Lathem are doing their research?

Archaeologists have been digging up and studying ancient plague victims for a long time now, unearthing old strains of the disease in the process, and scientists have been re-creating these pathogens in the lab. Let's just hope they know what they're doing.

Here's a paranoid scenario for you. Let's say that a plague researcher flips out for some reason. He kills somebody in a blind rage, stabbing them repeatedly, then panics and drives off in his car, heading cross-country. But instead of turning himself in later, he decides to take everyone with him and releases the plague bacilli he stole from his lab at different points along the way, creating a nationwide pandemic. 

The similarities between this scenario and the Lathem case are purely coincidental, of course. This kind of Robert Ludlum plotline could never happen in real life. After all, everybody knows that scientists are sane and responsible people.

Oldest Bubonic Plague Genome Decoded

"Nearly 4,000 years ago, a woman and a man were buried together just east of the Volga River in modern-day Russia, with a secret locked away in the pulp of their teeth." Source: Stat News.

"The bodies were uncovered just a few years ago, the teeth pulled and sent westward to the Max Planck Institute in Germany, where Maria Spyrou was working on a Ph.D. in paleogenetics. When she subjected the pulp to a bevy of genetic tests, she found something surprising: an ancestor of the bacteria responsible for the Black Death."

The bacillus Yersinia Pestis is thought to cause the plague. Maria Spyrou, in a paper published in Nature, argues that the discovery of a Y. Pestis ancestor in these prehistoric teeth shows that "the bacteria has origins at least 800 years earlier than scientists had previously thought." The find "suggests a Bronze Age origin for the Bubonic Plague."

Note: "Although prior studies had identified a single lineage of Y. pestis to be present across Eurasia during the Bronze Age, the current study suggests that there were at least two plague lineages circulating contemporaneously, and that they may have encompassed different transmission and virulence characteristics." Source: Archaeology News Network.

Related: Plague Likely a Stone Age Arrival To Central Europe (2017).

The Arrival & Spread Of The Black Death In Europe

"It may never be possible to identify the point of origin of the fourteenth-century plague with any precision. The disease had been endemic in several locations in Asia for centuries, flaring up occasionally and setting off the severe sixth-century pandemic. At any one of these sites an outbreak could have occurred that initiated the Black Death." Source: The Thought Company.

Related: The Black Plague Came To Norway In The Creepiest Way Possible.

Plague Reached Europe In The Stone Age

"A team of researchers led by scientists at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History has sequenced the first six European genomes of the plague-causing bacterium Yersinia pestis dating from the Late Neolithic to the Bronze Age (4,800 to 3,700 years ago). Analysis of these samples, published in Current Biology, suggests that the Stone Age Plague entered Europe during the Neolithic with a large-scale migration of people from the Eurasian steppe." Source: Archaeology News Network.

Nasty News: Rare "Coffin Birth" Found At Black Death Burial Site In Northern Italy

"Researchers investigating a 14th century burial ground have identified a rare case of 'coffin birth' - a gruesome phenomenon in which a deceased pregnant woman's fetus is expelled within the grave." Source: Archaeology News Network.