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Identifying the Plague
Surprisingly, one of the current areas of contention is over the identity of the organism that caused the first two historic plagues (541-c. 750, 1347-1720 or later). Within the last few years...
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Famine and Epidemics Come Hand in Hand
After many natural disasters, famines and epidemics quickly follow with depressing predictability. It is not just a coincidence related to the damaged infrastructure and loss of stored foodstuffs. It...
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Contagions Round-up 16: Pestilence and Burials
Romans emerging everywhere! Katy Meyers of Bones Don’t Lie writes about cremation cemeteries in the Roman Empire, and on a Viking ship burial in Scotland. Guy Halsall of Historian on the Edge writes...
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Contagions Round-up 16: Pestilence and Burials
Romans emerging everywhere! Katy Meyers of Bones Don’t Lie writes about cremation cemeteries in the Roman Empire, and on a Viking ship burial in Scotland. Guy Halsall of Historian on the Edge writes...
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Plague Detection by Immuno-PCR
Once again the Marseille research group is pushing the bounds of plague detection. This time their target is looking for a more sensitive method of detecting non-nucleic acid biomolecules from Yersinia...
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Generating Immunity to the Plague
Direct fluorescent antibody (DFA) of Yersinia pestis (Source: CDC) Its pretty amazing that we still don’t have a vaccine against the plague. Work still goes on and it hasn’t been easy by any means, but...
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Leptin: Linking Malnutrition and Vulnerability to Infection
The correlation between malnutrition and vulnerability to infection has been well established (discussed previously here). While the immune dysfunction could be characterized it was not until the last...
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The Landscape of Super-Spreading
Super-spreading individuals and disease hot spots have been known for over a century, but rarely have they been considered together. Sara Paull and colleagues [1] have pulled together all of the recent...
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Asymptomatic Plague: Qinghai, China, 2005
Now that we know the Tibet-Qinghai plateau region is where Yersinia pestis originated and the region where subsequent pandemics arose, I think its time to look more closely at regional outbreaks and...
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Western Iranian Plague Foci Still Active, 2011-2012
In a letter in this month’s Emerging Infectious Diseases, an Iranian and French team of epidemiologists report that the old plague focus in western Iran bordering Kurdistan is still active. Between...
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An Unnatural History of Emerging Infections
Ron Barrett and George Armelagos. An Unnatural History of Emerging Infections. Oxford University Press, 2013 (e-book) This is not a traditional review. In keeping with this blog’s function as my shared...
View ArticleMedieval Historians Taking Genomics into Account
At the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo (Kzoo) last month, I couldn't help feeling that we have reached a turning point. I went to four sessions that engaged in genomics, human...
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