Yersinia Pneumonic Plague Study

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Beginning around 1,500 years ago, fits of plague swept across and through Asia and Europe, demolishing millions of people. Although previously undisclosed variants of the plague germ had begun infecting people in both places copiously earlier. That is the cessation of a new study. Eske Willerslev works at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark as an evolutionary geneticist. He studies how the genes in DNA alters over elongated periods of time. Willerslev and his colleagues recently reported finding DNA from the bacteria that cause the Black Death in teeth from people who lived during the early Iron Age and Bronze Age. The germ that causes the plague is called Yersinia pestis. At first, this disease would have been passed on from person to person, like when an infected person coughed. If the germ triggered a lung infection, the disease would be called the pneumonic plague. The disease would be called the septicemic plague though if the blood became infected with the germ. In that case, the symptoms and illness would change as well. …show more content…
Willerslev now suspects those travelers likely caused the spread of early Y. pestis strains. New data suggests that different forms of the plague germ “survived in Eurasia for an extended period of time than previously expected,” said Hendrik Poinar, an evolutionary geneticist. He works at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. However, early forms of the germ likely did not set off major epidemics noted
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