Guest essay by Eric Worrall
A new study suggests that climate change is increasing the risk of humans contracting the plague. But the risk factors identified, even if the study is right, seem entirely manageable.
The Plague Is More Likely Now Thanks to Climate Change
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Molly Taft
November 20, 2021 at 8:50 amThe risk of the plague spilling over from humans to animals in the western U.S. has increased since 1950 thanks to climate change, a new study has found. Importantly, the research gives valuable insights into how this deadly disease has historically moved and developed in the U.S., which can help us understand more about its future.
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Yersinia pestis is the bacteria that causes plague — including that plague, the medieval Black Death, which killed around 25 million people over the course of four years in the 1300s. The bacteria is spread to humans from animals, most infamously rats, which carry plague-infested fleas on them. Scientists have theorised that the plague, like many other infectious diseases, will probably increase its spread to humans as the planet warms and people come into increasingly closer contact with wild animals.
But there’s not a lot of research out there on what historically are the best conditions for the plague to develop and get out of control. As a result, there are still a lot of big questions about the plague — like why it hasn’t spread to certain geographic areas, or why human cases don’t always overlap with where animals are carrying the disease — that remain unanswered.
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The study found that rodent communities in certain areas at higher elevations were up to 40% more likely to harbour the disease, which the researchers say is attributable to warming since 1950. That, in turn, means that the risk of the plague spreading from rodents to humans also increased, albeit more slightly.
“It’s a big, messy, tangled system, and there’s a lot of different levers controlling the ecology of the disease,” Carlson said. “But as we start to identify the big ones, we can look at how the key variables have changed since 1950, and it turns out — more and more of this region is starting to match the conditions that allow plague to hang out in animals, and increasingly, to make the jump into people.”
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Read more: https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2021/11/the-plague-is-more-likely-now-thanks-to-climate-change/
The abstract of the study;
Plague risk in the western United States over seven decades of environmental change
Colin J. Carlson, Sarah N. Bevins, Boris V. SchmidFirst published: 18 November 2021 https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.15966
Abstract
After several pandemics over the last two millennia, the wildlife reservoirs of plague (Yersinia pestis) now persist around the world, including in the western United States. Routine surveillance in this region has generated comprehensive records of human cases and animal seroprevalence, creating a unique opportunity to test how plague reservoirs are responding to environmental change. Here, we test whether animal and human data suggest that plague reservoirs and spillover risk have shifted since 1950. To do so, we develop a new method for detecting the impact of climate change on infectious disease distributions, capable of disentangling long-term trends (signal) and interannual variation in both weather and sampling (noise). We find that plague foci are associated with high-elevation rodent communities, and soil biochemistry may play a key role in the geography of long-term persistence. In addition, we find that human cases are concentrated only in a small subset of endemic areas, and that spillover events are driven by higher rodent species richness (the amplification hypothesis) and climatic anomalies (the trophic cascade hypothesis). Using our detection model, we find that due to the changing climate, rodent communities at high elevations have become more conducive to the establishment of plague reservoirs—with suitability increasing up to 40% in some places—and that spillover risk to humans at mid-elevations has increased as well, although more gradually. These results highlight opportunities for deeper investigation of plague ecology, the value of integrative surveillance for infectious disease geography, and the need for further research into ongoing climate change impacts.
Read more: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/gcb.15966
The plague is treatable with modern antibiotics, though it still kills a handful of people in the USA every year – antibiotic treatment has to be started very quickly when plague is suspected, for a good chance of survival. Regions where plague is endemic maintain vigilance against outbreaks.
I learned something new about plague – the study suggests it can persist in soil, like anthrax, allowing it to re-emerge sporadically and infect local wildlife even if all living carriers are eliminated, though plague is sensitive to soil chemistry – only some soils are suitable.
I think the biggest weakness with the study is in my opinion the study does not delve deeply enough into why modern plague distributions are tied to a small number of species. Plague can famously infect a very broad range of mammals. The study briefly mentions this issue, but I would have like to see more depth on why modern plague is so restricted.
Given some of the species of known reservoir animals are protected species, I strongly suspect the reason why plague is still endemic in some regions of the USA, is nobody has baited and eradicated the reservoir animals. If an unacceptable threat to human life emerged, an intensive culling programme which included protected species which are known carriers would likely quell the threat, regardless of any climatic factors.
Some of us would suggest that:
a/ They have cause & effect muddled up
b/ That the plague is already here.
Some may call it Obesity or diabetes but that’s far too limited.
Sugar is the beast in question. It is a poisoning on truly epic and global scale.
Sugar is a very sophisticated poison because its victims actually enjoy being poisoned, they encourage others to partake and, genuinely believe it is Good For Them
what do you do, what can you say
My comment is, the Americans are paying too much taxes and so their government has lots of money to throw away in the “scientific playground” where so-called “researchers” spend their time in ludic activities such as making “studies” like this one…
The truth is that Bubonic Plague was ravaged Europe during both the Dark Ages Cold Period as well as the Little Ice Age which started in the late 1300s while the Medieval Warm Period saw relatively little Plague activity. Reason was that during cold periods there were crop failures, low crop yields and people’s health was compromised as well as their immune systems at a low level. Thus, diseases such as TB, the sweating sickness, smallpox, dysentery, typhoid, influenza, mumps and gastrointestinal infections could and did kill. Historically cold periods were curses while warm periods brought economic prosperity, good eating and resulting health.
The way I see it the cold also had people spending more time in their abodes where they were more likely to be exposed to the rats that were the hosts of the flea vectors.
I personally suspect that most likely it was the rats that often infested ships in large numbers during that period that were the primary transporters of the disease from the east into Europe initially and more than likely also in the several different waves that hit the various regions of Western Europe at different times.
if youre suggesting rounding up rarer animals to cull them then it would be as easy to round em up and eartag them with a pesticide tag as is used in Aus for cattle etc up north where ticks etc are an issue
the tick/fleas dont bite no spread and youd have the protected species alive
BS! But even if I am wrong there is an effective vaccine and treatments. A while back I read where a poster here claimed there was no vaccine for plague because the infection can be adequately treated with modern antimicrobials. He is correct about the Bubonic form of the infection being easily treatable but apparently does not know about the pneumonic form of the infection.
Some facts:
Seems to me the vaccine for this disease has been widely administered. My Army shot record shows that I received a course of the vaccine while I was in the service, 1966-1975. I cannot have been the only person to be treated. Someone really, really needed to get published; not even a scary story, unless we do gain of function research on this. This is so 1300s.
I was in the service during the same period. I remember walking down a line and being hit in both shoulders with air injectors, probably more than once. I’d have to dig through my papers to find my old vaccination record to see just what I was being vaccinated against. It seems like they were trying to cover all the possibilities. I’m actually surprised at all the ‘antivax’ sentiment in the country. Generally, we were glad to have the Army take preemptive measures to keep us from getting sick. However, the one thing they missed caused most of us in Basic Training at Ft. Bliss (TX) to have what appeared to be ‘Walking Pneumonia.’ In retrospect, I think what we had was a fungal infection called Valley Fever (coccidioidomycosis).
The only cause of increased disease in the world is the stupidity of leftards.
Another expensive offering for the bin. Mind there were bits in it which made me curious.
The plague is from policy. It’s not personal–until it is.
The insanity among climate alarmist scientists has surged beyond “Monty Python” levels. That a single degree of global warming over the past century, and the zero warming since the 1941 peak in the US, gets the blame for any increase in the plague, and that the huge development and population increase in the western US is completely ignored, shows that this isn’t a valid scientific paper but the rantings of fanatics.
Also ignored that previous plagues seemed to correspond with downturns in the climate. The so-called Dark Ages seemed to get a good start as early as the late 100s, early 200s when the Roman warm period seems to have petered out. And then there was the years of no summer, only rain, at the turn of the 1300’s, so that by the mid 1300s people were malnourished enough that the plague could take affect. In the latter Little Ice Age small pox was the big killer, and also it seems grain mold (growing like crazy in the damp cold conditions) was driving people batty, with thoughts of witches everywhere.
All that isn’t iron-clad proven, but a much better theory than 1°C being the all-purpose boogie man. And why not just kill the rats?! Much better than impoverishing the world by trying to take away the engine of prosperity that fossil fuels have been these past 2 centuries.
Using the same logic as presented in the alarmist propaganda paper mentioned above, the warming of the past century is the cause for the huge drop in poverty, the iratication of various worldwide diseases like typhoid, diphtheria, polio, measles, small pox, etc. And the warmer temperatures must also be responsible for the huge increase in lifespan, regardless of social economic factors, of the whole population of our Big Blue Marble.
If the alarmists’ paper is even a tiny bit true then my little scribble is an axiom.
We’ve already got a plague of climate “scientists”.
A 30 second google search indicates that the great plague pandemics happened in 541, 1347 and 1894. The World war rather cool at those dates.
Anyway, we can cure plague with antibiotics.
I’m stuck on the first sentence of the article: “The risk of the plague spilling over from humans to animals in the western U.S. has increased since 1950”
From humans to animals? I keep looking to see how we’re giving plague to cattle or something.
As an infectious disease physician I am well aware of the plague history. The plague emerged and ravaged Europe during cold periods of climate, not warm. The study suggests the reservoir species in North America are primarily found at higher (colder) altitudes. None of this supports the contention that the risk will rise with global warming and I have no patience with those advocates who now want to ignore that “climate change” is actually supposed to be “global warming” according to all of their unfounded theories.
An important additional risk factor that appears to have fueled the plague events was malnutrition which in turn was partly precipitated by cold adverse climate with reduced crop success. As with many things the global warming fools predict, the bad outcomes will not come from natural climate change but from the adverse effects of the policies these fools promote. Get rid of fossil fuels and industrial agriculture and any number of infectious and nutritional diseases will ramp up rapidly and push us back into the dark ages.
The biggest weakness is that it’s based on assumptions and models.
Instead of studying centuries of ‘Yersinia pestis’ plaques globally, they narrowly focused where ‘yersinia pestis’ plaques have been minor happenings.
Yellow fever was a major killer in North America. ‘Yersinia pestis’, not much at all.
Many folks contract ‘Yersinia pestis’ because they slept where rodents with infected fleas nested and left hungry fleas and abundant fecal matter.
Not from super populations of fleas on super abundant populations of rodents.
Nor during periods of cold clammy weather and famine.
‘Yersinia pestis’ infections have been solitary to a small handful.
This isn’t just about Norwegian rats, (rattus norvegicus) and related rat pests.
Quite a few rodents, including ultra cute endangered and protected ones, from the Midwest to the Pacific have similar fleas that harbor and transmit ‘Yersinia pestis’.
Baiting and eradicating across large areas tends to eradicate rare species including rare predatory and carrion eating species more than it reduces the fecund rapid reproducing rodents.