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Two researchers at Liverpool University, Dr Susan Scott and Prof Christopher Duncan, have
recently shown that the causative agent was not a bacterium but a virus, with unusual
epidemiological characteristics. Scott and Duncan base their conclusions on modern
techniques of epidemiology, molecular biology and computer modeling to the analysis of
historical records.
The Black Death arrived in Sicily in 1347, and travelled rapidly to the north, reaching all
Europe. The mortality was devastating: around 25 million people died, an estimated 25-75% of
the European population. It was the beginning of the age of plagues, which lasted for over 300
years. In 1670, it suddenly, mysteriously – and thankfully – disappeared.
The Black Death was immediately accepted as an infectious disease, spread person-to-person.
Doctors and health authorities identified a 40-day quarantine period. This was strictly observed
all over Europe for three centuries: the people of a community knew that they were safe when
nobody died of plague for 40 days. When King Henry VIII decided to reduce the period, his
decision became tragically ineffective and it had to be immediately reversed.
The biology of bubonic plague was discovered at the end of the 19th century. Bubonic plague
is still endemic in parts of Asia today and it is deadly, but usually treatable with modern
medicine. From 1900, scientists generally accepted that it was the causative agent of Europe's
300-year malady.
In Biology of Plagues, Scott and Duncan show that Bubonic plague was falsely accused. The
brown rat did not arrive in Europe until 1720 – fifty years after the plague disappeared – and
quarantine measures are completely ineffective against bubonic plague. Scott and Duncan
studied the mortality in individual families, and found a consistent period of 37-38 days
between infection and inevitable death. The period had three stages: a latent period, of 10-12
days, an infectious period (with no symptoms) of 20-22 days, and finally a 5-day period
showing symptoms before death. Therefore, a victim had 32 days to travel by foot, horseback
or sea, carrying a deadly infection that he did not know about. This explains the 40-day
quarantine period. And computer modelling techniques can show why a ‘typical' plague
epidemic in England lasted 8-9 months. The authors decided to call it “haemorrhagic plague”,
to distinguish it clearly from Bubonic plague.
What was the cause of haemorrhagic plague? After an examination of the symptoms
(particularly the red spots on a patient’s body) and primitive autopsy reports, Scott and Duncan
suggest that it was possibly a form of filovirus, similar to Ebola.
Could haemorrhagic plague return? If this happened, the long incubation period and modern
transport would allow apparently healthy people to spread the disease rapidly all over the
world. The mortality would be catastrophic.
5. Scott and Duncan don’t agree with the “Bubonic” theory because…
a. there were no rats in Europe at the time.
b. quarantine is a bad remedy to Bubonic plague.
c. Bubonic fever shows symptoms only after 32 days.