Groucho's Fact Hunt

[Dylan]

There is little evidence that during the Black Death the rat was a carrier of the bubonic plague.
http://www.historyextra.com/article...ngs-you-probably-didnt-know-about-black-death

Yeah, not the greatest article though is it.

Not only textbooks but serious monographs on the Black Death and its successive waves of plague into the early 19th century in Europe go on about rats (usually the black ones) and fleas without qualification. But what is the evidence?

No contemporary observers described any epizootic [animal epidemic] of rats or of any other rodents immediately before or during the Black Death, or during any later plagues in Europe – that is, until the ‘third pandemic’ at the end of the 19th century. Yet in subtropical regions of Africa and China, descriptions of ‘rat falls’ accompanying a human disease with buboes in the principal lymph nodes reach back at least to the 18th century.

As for fleas, unlike during the ‘third pandemic’, when plague cases and deaths followed closely the seasonal fertility cycles of various species of rat fleas, no such correlations are found with the Black Death or later European plagues before the end of the 19th century.

basically says 'not rats or fleas' but fails to actually give a cause.

And wasn't it largely a plague of poor hygiene rather than of class? As in, people with poor hygiene were more likely to contract it.

 

[summerisle]

Yeah, not the greatest article though is it.



basically says 'not rats or fleas' but fails to actually give a cause.

Don't blame the messenger

 

[summerisle]

Who would have thought that :

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-31588671

 

[Dylan]

Don't blame the messenger

No mate, you are getting full 'credit' for that article. And isn't the messenger normally shot?

 

[summerisle]

No mate, you are getting full 'credit' for that article. And isn't the messenger normally shot?

Especially if you're called Speckled Jim.

 

[Dylan]

I am going to go with rats and fleas until someone can actually come up with something tangible:

The dominant explanation for the Black Death is the plague theory, which attributes the outbreak to Yersinia pestis, also responsible for an epidemic that began in southern China in 1865, eventually spreading to India. The investigation of the pathogen that caused the 19th-century plague was begun by teams of scientists who visited Hong Kong in 1894, among whom was the French-Swiss bacteriologist Alexandre Yersin, after whom the pathogen was named Yersinia pestis. The mechanism by which Y. pestis was usually transmitted was established in 1898 by Paul-Louis Simond and was found to involve the bites of fleas whose midguts had become obstructed by replicating Y. pestis several days after feeding on an infected host. This blockage results in starvation and aggressive feeding behaviour by the fleas, which repeatedly attempt to clear their blockage by regurgitation, resulting in thousands of plague bacteria being flushed into the feeding site, infecting the host. The bubonic plague mechanism was also dependent on two populations of rodents: one resistant to the disease, which act as hosts, keeping the disease endemic, and a second that lack resistance. When the second population dies, the fleas move on to other hosts, including people, thus creating a human epidemic.

 

[summerisle]

I am going to go with rats and fleas until someone can actually come up with something tangible:

I'm happy with gerbils myself. Or this :

http://www.theweek.co.uk/health-sci...eas-hook-humans-passed-black-death-each-other

 

[Dylan]

I'm happy with gerbils myself. Or this :

http://www.theweek.co.uk/health-sci...eas-hook-humans-passed-black-death-each-other

Mate, I do believe the standard procedure for being a scientist, is, rather than giving an interview to the Guardian, publish your research (showing your work) in an accredited medical journal. Otherwise, I can provide a study that conclusively proves that Hubba-Bubba was the primary transmission method for the bubonic plague

Hey ho....fact time....the average person's heart beats just over 100,000 times a day.

 

[admirschleck]

Some of you may already know this, but it is a pretty cool fact. Tsutomu Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima for work when the first A-bomb hit, made it home to Nagasaki for the second, and lived to be 93.

Also, a 2009 search for the Loch Ness Monster came up empty. Scientists did find over 100,000 golf balls.

 

[summerisle]

Mate, I do believe the standard procedure for being a scientist, is, rather than giving an interview to the Guardian, publish your research (showing your work) in an accredited medical journal. Otherwise, I can provide a study that conclusively proves that Hubba-Bubba was the primary transmission method for the bubonic plague

Hey ho....fact time....the average person's heart beats just over 100,000 times a day.

But there was a programme on Channel 5 about, oh,err, time for a cup of tea and Arrowroot biscuit.

 

[Groucho]

I am going to go with rats and fleas until someone can actually come up with something tangible:

I'm happy with gerbils myself. Or this :

http://www.theweek.co.uk/health-sci...eas-hook-humans-passed-black-death-each-other

Perhaps it's simply that the skeletons found had pneumonia as well as the plague?

 

[Ashtonian]

something i never actually realised until i read it yesterday. The difference between mist and fog?

turns out, for all the sciency ways you can go into it, basically fog is a cloud thats either fallen to earth, or formed at this low a level.

 

[The Cowboy]

IKEA uses 1% of the world's wood each year

Don't they replant a tree for every tree they use? They seem like a very 'green' company to me.

 

[Philw]

something i never actually realised until i read it yesterday. The difference between mist and fog?

turns out, for all the sciency ways you can go into it, basically fog is a cloud thats either fallen to earth, or formed at this low a level.

So what's mist?

 

[AndyC]

Don't they replant a tree for every tree they use? They seem like a very 'green' company to me.

If they do that, then good on them.
Hope they plant deciduous trees as well as conifers.