Black Death's Genome Cracked

exceed writes: "This article on Wired, and this article on Yahoo! News states that scientists have decoded the genome of the bubonic plague bacterium. This will now (hopefully soon) lead to vaccinations and treatments for the disease it causes."

Re:It's not fair

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, most people of european descent are relatively resistant to the disease. Comes from being descended from those who lived through it when 1/3 of Europe died. Of course, as your post indicates, some of us have descended farther than others...

Cats rule

[DEATH AND HATRED]

During the christian, err I mean dark ages, people killed cats because they thought they were witches. The rodent population ran out of control, causing the black plauge problem. 1/3 of Europe was wiped out. The moral of the story. Cats rule, dogs drool.

vaccine availability

[leucadiadude]

Smallpox:
CDC is the only source of vaccinia vaccine and VIG for civilians. CDC will provide vaccinia vaccine to protect laboratory and other health-care personnel whose occupations place them at risk for exposure to vaccinia and other closely related Orthopoxviruses, including vaccinia recombinants. Vaccine should be administered under the supervision of a physician selected by the institution. Vaccine will be shipped to the responsible physician. Requests for vaccine and VIG, including the reason for the request, should be referred to

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Drug Services, National Center for Infectious Diseases
Mailstop D-09
Atlanta, GA 30333
Telephone: [phone]
Facsimile: [phone]

Plague:
Plague vaccine is available in the United States from Greer Labs. Plague vaccine USP is manufactured by Greer Laboratories, Inc., P.O. Box 800, Lenoir, NC, 28645-0800, telephone [phone] or [phone]. The vaccine is shipped refrigerated in 20ml vials and should be stored at 2-8 degrees C (35-46 degrees F). It should not be frozen. The following groups of people should consider vaccination:

Persons working with the plague bacterium in the laboratory or in the field. Persons working in plague-affected areas or with potentially infected animals where they have little control over their environments, particularly in developing countries.

I don't know where you might find tularemia vaccine or some of the other lesser known organisms.

Plague and a little childs song - OT

[deadmantalking]

Just rememebered that as a child i used to sing
"ring-a-ring-a roses,
pocket full of posies,
husha busha,
all fall down"
and never really understood what it was all about. then i found out that it was referring to the black plague epidemic of London when about a third(?) of the population was wiped out and people actually dropped dead on the streets...

A couple questions

[Z4rd0Z]

Since the article mentions there is already a vaccine for this, why is there talk that this could be used to create a vaccine? Why would we need another?

The scientists were saying they knew that the bacteria modified itself and they even knew that it did it 1500 years ago. How do they know that? Would anyone with some knowledge of this care to speculate?

Re:To clarify a couple points

[da5idnetlimit.com]

"the symptoms are not all that different from symptoms of diseases people are used to "

=> So the solution would be to use directly DNA Analysis, or an automated Marker Machine, so as to check immediatly the DNA Strain and treat it with proper care.
Could also be used to be sure that the medicine we told you to take are effective against your own specific flue strain (that from somebody wo never cached the mainstream disease and ended up with an inneficient generic treatment)

Only problem is that automated DNA Analysers are WAY out of budget for 99.999 Hospitals.

But a part of the future lies there...

"It's a three-part chain involving rodents, fleas, and humans" => I never understood the need for fleas, before somebody told me abour food chain. Right now, I still don't find a need for Mosquitoes (bloody bastards 8| ).

Re:To clarify a couple points

[GooberToo]

Few and far between is text that shows many that survived daily exposure ate two or more raw cloves of garlic daily. The stink surely was enough to ward off vampires and plague alike. Although it is unknown how common this practice was, we are only now starting to understand that eating raw garlic does, in fact, increase the body's ability to respond to invasion by disease.

Oddly enough, there are also biblical accounts of people eating a cousin of garlic (sorry, don't remember the odd-ball name) which was said to also ward of disease. Go figure...

Grand Forks, ND

[forest_rock]

A friend of mine has been doing research at UND, Grand Forks. Most of the bug's DNA has been decoded for a long time. They've been cloning and disabling black death for years in their labs. Recently (this past summer), they engineered a mutant hybrid which isn't dangerous to humans. With the complete genome, they should be able to do really fun stuff with it.

Bubonic to Pneumonic

[AKAJack]

As I remember it the biggest problem with the "Black Plague" of the middle ages was that Bubonic plague can become Pneumonic (of the lungs) plague and then humans can infect other humans by coughing/sneezing and *that* is the reason for the wide spread of the disease. It was not necessarily because everyone had a house full of flea infested rats.

Hygine does play an obvious and important factor in all of this as bathing was seen as something to avoid in order to stay healthy.

Feel free to correct me as needed.