Rats Didn’t Spread the Black Death—It Was Humans | HISTORY (2024)
Rats have long been blamed for spreading the Black Death around Europe in the 14th century. Specifically, historians have speculated that the fleas on rats are responsible for the estimated 25 million plague deaths between 1347 and 1351.
However, a new study suggests that rats weren’t the main carriers of fleas and lice that spread the plague—it was humans.
In a study published in January 2017 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers simulated Black Death outbreaks in European cities to try and understand how the plague was spread. In their simulations, they looked at three possible models for infection: rats, airborne transmission, and fleas and ticks that humans carry around with them on their bodies and clothes.
In most of the cities, the model that focused on fleas and ticks on humans was the most accurate model for explaining the spread of the disease.Though it may come as a surprise to most readers, previous studies have backed up these findings. The consensus seems to be that the plague spread too fast for rats to be the culprit carriers.
“It would be unlikely to spread as fast as it did if it was transmitted by rats,” Nils Stenseth, a professor at the University of Oslo and co-author of Monday’s study, told BBC News. “It would have to go through this extra loop of the rats, rather than being spread from person to person.”
It’s not clear where the belief that rats spread the plague came from in the first place. After all, the researchers write that “there is little historical and archaeological support for such a claim.” For example, if rats really were a main cause of the plague, there would be more archaeological evidence of dead rats.
Human fleas, not rat fleas, may be most to blame for the Black Death. Black Death was an especially extreme outbreak of bubonic plague. Bacteria known as Yersinia pestis cause this disease. When these bacteria are not infecting people, they hang out in rodents, such as rats, prairie dogs and ground squirrels.
Recent research suggests rats may not have played the critical role in keeping plague going in Europe. The Black Death ravaged Europe between 1347 and 1353, killing millions. Plague outbreaks in Europe then continued until the 19th century.
Plague is caused by infection with the bacterium Yersinia pestis and is typically spread through the bite of infected fleas, frequently carried by rats, causing bubonic plague. Symptoms include painful, swollen lymph nodes, called bubos, as well as fever, chills and coughing.
Once people have the disease, the bacteria can spread to others who have close contact with them. Because of the delay between being exposed to the bacteria and becoming sick, people could travel over a large area before becoming contagious and possibly infecting others.
Through the rodents who lived in the moist, grassy areas. They got fleas who carried the disease. The people who killed the rats infected with the fleas and were exposed to the furs.
From Crimea, it was most likely carried by fleas living on the black rats that travelled on Genoese ships, spreading through the Mediterranean Basin and reaching North Africa, Western Asia, and the rest of Europe via Constantinople, Sicily, and the Italian Peninsula.
There are disease concerns with both wild (rats, mice) and pet (rats, mice, hamsters, gerbils, guinea pigs) rodents and rabbits. They can carry many diseases including hantavirus, leptospirosis, lymphocytic choriomeningitis (LCMV), Tularemia and Salmonella.
The eventual weakening of the pandemic was likely due to the practice of quarantining infected people that originated in Venice in the 15th century and is with us to this day. Improved sanitation, personal hygiene, and medical practices also played a role in ultimately slowing the plague's terror march.
Cholera, bubonic plague, smallpox, and influenza are some of the most brutal killers in human history. And outbreaks of these diseases across international borders, are properly defined as pandemic, especially smallpox, which throughout history, has killed between 300-500 million people in its 12,000 year existence.
The most popular attempt to cure the plague was bloodletting using leeches. It was thought that the leeches would draw out the bad blood that caused the disease and leave the good blood in the body.
Rats traveled on ships and brought fleas and plague with them. Because most people who got the plague died, and many often had blackened tissue due to gangrene, bubonic plague was called the Black Death.
The bubonic plague wiped out tens of millions of people in Europe in the 14th century — gaining the grim label the Black Death. In 2024, a handful of cases arise each year in the United States and around the world — though the diseaseis far less common and far more treatable.
According to the CDC, all forms of plague are treatable with common antibiotics, with early treatment drastically improving chances of survival. Even though Y pestis can still occur almost anywhere, and can be fatal to individuals, a larger pandemic echoing the Black Death is thus pretty much impossible.
Scientists now believe the plague spread too fast for rats to be the culprits. Rats have long been blamed for spreading the Black Death around Europe in the 14th century.
Modern research has suggested that, over that period of time, plague was introduced into Europe multiple times, coming along trade routes in waves from Central Asia as a result of climate fluctuations that affected populations of rodents infested with plague-carrying fleas.
Some believed it was a punishment from God, some believed that foreigners or those who followed a different religion had poisoned the wells, some thought that bad air was responsible, some thought the position of the planets had caused the plague.
In October 1347, a ship came from the Crimea and Asia and docked in Messina, Sicily.Aboard the ship were not only sailors but rats.The rats brought with them the Black Death, the bubonic plague. Reports that came to Europe about the disease indicated that 20 million people had died in Asia.
Final answer: A decline in rat population in England could have been caused by multiple factors such as harsh climatic conditions leading to scarce food resources, the plague pandemic and law restrictions on the fur trade in the 17th century.
A: Fleas become infected by feeding on infected animals such as chipmunks, prairie dogs, rabbits, ground squirrels, rock squirrels, tree squirrels, mice and woodrats infected with the bacteria. The infected fleas then transmit the plague bacteria to humans and other mammals during the blood feeding process.
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