A team of scientists from Canada, Germany, and the US has decoded the Black Death's genetic code from teeth that were found in graves dating from the
time the plague hit Europe.
Working in high biosecurity laboratories, those scientists are looking to see whether changing the code of modern day Yersinia strains to include
those substitutions would ramp up the virulence of the bacteria. They are doing the work in chemical assays, not animals.
As required by the rules of scientific publishing, Poinar's team will put the sequence for the ancient Yersinia bacteria into Genbank, an open access
database.
He acknowledges that will likely cause alarm in some quarters. "I think it makes some people nervous," he said. "(But) science has to move forward
and we need to know if these are indeed changes and could these changes account for the increased virulence and can we control for that virulence
today."
Of course it will cause alarm in some quarters! This will only add to the list of potential dangerous experiments going on around the world. Nothing
is forever secured, and this, like many other things, is like a ticking bomb.
Aside from that, it's still a scientific accomplishment.
"It's very cool," said Dr. Jeffery Taubenberger, the American scientist who led the effort to find and sequence the virus responsible for the 1918
Spanish flu pandemic, the only previous time a pathogen of old has been decoded. To have gone from tiny fragments of DNA to the completed genome is
"an extraordinary technical advance," said Taubenberger, who runs a lab at the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in
Bethesda, Md.
"Even up to a year ago it was basically a pipe dream to get this level of genomic information," he said in a telephone interview.
I wonder how one feels, knowing one's work is bringing back to life old, dangerous and lethal life forms?
Black Death article.
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Here is another article, with a video. It says the changes in the bacteria is in the order of only a dozen, when compared with its modern version. So
the reason they say it is not dangerous anymore is because we have evolved and our living conditions have changed.
Not for the whole world, it hasn't. Think of Africa, where many could be decimated by this...
In devastating the population, it changed the human immune system, basically wiping out people who couldn't deal with the disease and leaving the
stronger to survive, said study co-author Hendrik Poinar of McMaster University in Ontario.
One can only hope it holds true to this day, but...
People still get the disease, usually from fleas from rodents or other animals, but not that often. There are around 2,000 cases a year in the world,
mostly in rural areas, with a handful of them popping up in remote parts of the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention.
In other words, we have changed, but some people still are not resistant to it, and that is in rural or remote environment we can see it. But with
the medical systems collapsing like everything else, everywhere, how long before it hits a densely populated area?
WE have changed
Hm. Really?
