
DNA confirms cause of 1665 London's Great Plague - grahamel
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-37287715
======
pjlegato
Defoe's account of people being buried in heaps is not necessarily at odds
with this excavation of neat coffin burials.

The plague didn't instantly reach full intensity on day one. During the early
phases of the epidemic, deaths were not yet widespread enough to require mass
graves, and burials proceeded semi-normally.

During the later, more intense phases, things were much worse. There were both
more bodies needing to be buried and fewer available funerary service
providers such as coffinmakers and undertakers around to deal with them, since
many had themselves either died of the plague or fled the city. Faced with
growing heaps of rotting infectious corpses in the streets, hastily dug mass
graves were often resorted to by the survivors.

~~~
oh_sigh
I'm sure there were socio-economic factors in burial as well. I suspect the
lower class were much more likely to be thrown into mass graves than more well
to do merchants

~~~
pjlegato
Well to do people could also much more readily flee the city to their country
houses and escape infection, while poorer people had nowhere else to go.

~~~
hga
Are you really sure about that?

Back then, most would have roots in some farm. Heck, that's true for many many
people today, my parents, for example, my mother's home is still a working
farm....

Now, if you had to become a serf again to go back to the farm....

~~~
pjlegato
Of course, not _all_ poor people were confined to the city. As you say, some
came from a village where they still had relatives... who were not going to be
very happy when a walking disease vector showed up from London and recent
exposure to the Great Plague, even if he had a few pennies to contribute to
his upkeep.

Many were, however, unable to leave because they had nowhere to go. Many came
from families that had been in the city for generations and now had no contact
with their ancestral villages. There was no Facebook or telephones, and poor
people could usually neither write nor afford postage even if they could
write. Moreover, families were frequently fractured. Unwanted children were
simply turned out into the street, or they might wind up there when their
parents died. They then had no clue who their relatives were or what village
they'd come from.

Classical medieval serfdom had largely died out by the 17th century in
England, but the villages were still often grindingly poor. There wasn't
enough food to feed the (poor) people who lived there normally. Even during
normal times, some penniless distant cousin showing up from London would often
be despised as yet another mouth to feed (which is why they'd moved to the
city in the first place.)

Many others just couldn't afford the trip. The sheer level of extreme poverty
in which most Londoners lived at the time is hard to imagine for westerners
today. Travel itself was expensive and dangerous during normal times, even for
those who had some place to go. The plague made it more expensive and more
dangerous.

For bottom-rung workers ekeing out a marginal sub-subsistence existence, for
people who went hungry several days each week anyway during the best times,
hiring a horse was out of the question. Their only option was to walk, perhaps
for weeks, with whatever food and money they could carry. Poor people (read:
almost everyone) had no access to banking services, so if they lost that
money, they were screwed. (This wasn't a problem for most, as they didn't have
any money to begin with.)

They not only faced highway robbery at every turn, but hostile peasants. No
rural village was opening its arms to take in people who had just come
directly from plague-ridden London. Such people were seen as dangerous
threats, walking disease vectors likely to infect the whole town and kill
everyone if they were not immediately driven off.

Wealthy people, by contrast, had horses, carriages, servants, guards, private
food stores, and gated country estates.

~~~
hga
Ah, yeah, I'm sure you're more in the right, although I suspect you
underestimate people's resourcefulness.

Somehow I missed the "this is the 1665 plague" (and forgot about, for example,
Newton went back home when Cambridge University closed as a precaution), and
was thinking back to the big initial wave in the 14th Century (the Black
Death) when England and London weren't quite as advanced; kinda scary it kept
hitting in waves for 3+ centuries....

------
yitchelle
"To reassure anyone worried whether plague bacterium was released from the
excavation work or scientific analysis, it doesn't survive in the ground."

------
BorisVSchmid
I am happy with every new ancient DNA sequence of plague that becomes
available. Combined, they can be used to figure out the way the disease spread
across Eurasia and persisted in Europe.

That said, I would like these news articles to actually link to the scientific
paper, or if the paper is not published yet/still under review, at least
mention that.

~~~
hga
Eh, isn't that's kinda hard and dangerous, for the simplest way is to infect
animals with these strains, and I kinda doubt any humans are volunteering to
play their part....

Just having a DNA sequence is quite some distance from the proteins it
produces, the regulatory system that governs what, when and how much, and the
effect of them on us poor animals. But this has got to be a hot area of
research....

------
aikah
> To reassure anyone worried whether plague bacterium was released from the
> excavation work or scientific analysis, it doesn't survive in the ground.

Thank god, what a relief !

To be frank, looking at the pictures of students working on site,that very
question crossed my mind.

------
runarb
Can thus bacterias be dangerous somehow? For example be more potent than the
plague that sometimes surfaces today.

The people in the pictures do not appear to wear much protection.

~~~
hga
It can no doubt be treated with an antibiotic, and they've probably determined
some that work that are also comparable with humans.

The real trick is to avoid creating and breathing in an aerosol, which has I'm
sure killed more than one researcher before he and his doctor realized what
was happening, I heard of one such case in the '70s when I was doing work on
_E. Coli_ during a summer program involving salmonella. If you get too much
lung tissue--- _lots_ of surface area---infected too quickly, well, see
pneumonic plague, it's anthrax equivalent, which an Air Force flight surgeon's
manual said the first clear diagnostic sign from a patient is his sudden
death, etc.

And echoing loxs, it's very unlikely they're working with viable bacteria, if
they're just sequencing DNA or the like they're far, far from something
viable, and I don't believe it creates spores.

~~~
kijin
I wonder whether these 17th-century strains of bacteria, if they survived and
infected someone today, would have less resistance to modern antibiotics than
modern strains do. That would make them much easier to manage.

~~~
fdgdasfadsf
They would - until they started exchanging DNA with modern bacteria.

~~~
hga
"Modern", sort of, since these antibiotics have generally started from
compounds molds etc. use for attacks on bacteria in the same ecological niche,
many if not most?? of these counters have by and large been there all along in
the modern age of antibiotics, it's just that they now spread a lot more since
they give bacteria attacking humans a competitive advantage (few if any of
these otherwise help the bacteria, especially unless the plasmid or whatever
has a regulatory system to turn it off when not needed).

And many can be countered with standard mutations, i.e. something that messes
with the surface protein that transports them inside. When I was doing a bit
of _E. Coli_ microbiology in the summer of 1977 the conventional wisdom was
for a generic antibiotic, like the colicin we were working with, 1 in a
million bacterial would spontaneously develop a mutation (which I further did
the grunt work to prove the ones we had were of the surface protein type, by
and large). Streptomycin, though, would take 1 in a billion.

------
loxs
TL;DR - Yersinia pestis
-[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yersinia_pestis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yersinia_pestis)

~~~
pjlegato
So the story is that the Great Plague actually was bubonic plague, as had
always been believed.

~~~
hga
Not exactly always, some of the no doubt distorted by the passage of time
reported symptoms don't align with what we know of at least more modern
strains of the plague, e.g. stuff more like what's seen with modern
hemorrhagic viruses.

The official third and most recent pandemic started in 1855 in China and
reached the US by the turn of the century, so we have much more solid reports
of that strain's behavior:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_(disease)#Third_pandemi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_\(disease\)#Third_pandemic:_19th_and_20th_centuries)

------
CraigLam
It seems to me, the people (inn-keepers, etc) were way too accepting of the
refugees. They should have been barricading the town gates. Many of them paid
with their lives, and their family's lives. I'm still reading A Journal of the
Plague Year, it's fascinating and surprisingly modern in tone, despite the
archaic language. It's like one of those zombie apocalypse films, except this
guy was living it for real. Recommended :)

~~~
ZeroGravitas
The novel "World War Z" basically touches on this resemblance. The author
seems to have read lots of information about what real humans due when plagues
and diseases strike and how human society reacts, and then transposed it to
zombie apocalypse, which gives it a strange kind of authenticity.

The book wasn't very film-able, so the movie they made from it was quite
different in approach.

I've also heard there's a non-fiction book about the "Spanish flu" outbreak
that basically reads like a zombie film (e.g. one interesting tidbit, they
call it the Spanish Flu because that is where the first reported cases were,
but it didn't start there, the other countries just suppressed the information
because they were at war)

~~~
Ericson2314
Thanks for the tidbit

