Greetings, my fellow port swillers!
As is her habit from time to time, teh Eldest Gel approached me this evening with a piece of trivia she had picked up somewhere, namely, that there’s a new theory floating about that Asian gerbils were responsible for the bubonic plague that ravaged Medieval Europe, not rats.
This was intriguing enough to ol’ Robbo’s scattershot brain that I had to look it up. Turns out she’s right:
“What we are suggesting is that it was gerbils in Central Asia and the bacterium in gerbils that eventually came to Europe,” Stenseth says. The scientists used climate records to check their theory, and they found a tentative link. When the climate in Asia was good, gerbils are thought to have thrived; but when it went bad, the population crashed. And about 15 years after each boom and bust, a plague outbreak erupted in Europe. The theory is that fleas carrying plague jumped from dead gerbils to pack animals and human traders, who then brought it to European cities. The research team’s results appear in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Of course, rats are still disgusting creatures. (The jury is still out on Siberian hamsters.)
This reminds me of something: The Left attaches all sorts of moral opprobrium to the introduction of small-pox and other diseases by Europeans to the Americas, where said diseases devastated indigenous populations who had no immunity to them. The tone, if not the explicit argument, is that the Europeans did it on purpose as part of their eeeeevil genocidal strategy. Have you ever, ever, heard a single similar argument made with respect to the introduction of the plague to European populations from the East and the Middle East?
No, neither have I.
But then again, consistency is hardz.
The Port Stands At Your Elbow 
7 comments
Comments feed for this article
February 27, 2015 at 8:49 am
the gripping hand
I think you may have missed the point of the article. If the gerbils died off during a climate change, forcing the fleas to relocate, then obviously climate change will cause new plagues and we need a gerbil tax to prevent it! Or giant space hamsters.
February 27, 2015 at 12:45 pm
rbj1
Actually I have heard of Asian peoples besieging Western cities and catapulting diseased dead bodies into said cities. But that is simply a discussion of tactics, more for shock effect rather than a thorough understanding of the germ theory that wasn’t developed until hundreds of years later. And of course, non Caucasians can do no wrong.
February 27, 2015 at 2:37 pm
rbj1
BTW, Robbo, what were you doing running around in Sun City Arizona yesterday?
February 27, 2015 at 5:03 pm
The Lurker
The narrative that I seem to hear involves white settlers deliberately giving blankets, etc. that had been used by smallpox victims to Native Americans (formerly known as Red Indians). It does seem like a theory that assumes a more sophisticated knowledge of the causes and transmissibility of disease than many settlers are likely to have had. Even if there were evidence for this theory (I’ve not seen any, but haven’t looked for it), it doesn’t explain the knee jerk charge of racism whenever a modern-day typhoid mary hops on a plane with Ebola and travels to the west, and a suggestion is made of moral or legal responsibility on the part of the plague-carrier.
February 27, 2015 at 5:46 pm
Robbo
RBJ – Heh. Ace did a throwaway post on that yesterday afternoon and in the comments one of the Moron Horde gave a shout out to the old LB’s. It was gratifying.
February 27, 2015 at 6:26 pm
captainned
Ah, for another glance at Miss Melissa at the head of the LlamaButchers page.
February 28, 2015 at 2:26 pm
Robbo
[Heaves long sigh]