The bubonic plague, also known as Black Death, was one of the deadliest pandemics in history, killing around 50 million people from 1346 to 1353. Now, this ancient, deadly disease has been discovered lurking in the DNA of an Egyptian mummy.
I’m thinking maybe we should leave it be…
The Mirror reported that a team of archaeologists recently found yersinia pestis—the Black Death—in the bone tissue and intestinal content of an ancient Egyptian mummy in Turin, Italy.
“The individual, who was anthropogenically mummified, was radiocarbon-dated from the end of the Second Intermediate Period to the beginning of the New Kingdom, yet its exact provenance within Egypt is unknown,” the team wrote in a report published by the European Meeting of the Paleopathology Association.
“This is the first reported prehistoric Y. pestis genome outside Eurasia providing molecular evidence for the presence of plague in ancient Egypt, although we cannot infer how widespread the disease was during this time,” they added.
In the US, an average of seven human plague cases are reported annually, with over 80% of cases having been bubonic form. Symptoms of the bubonic plague include fever, headache, chills, weakness, and swollen, painful lymph nodes. The disease is most often spread by infected fleas.
Thankfully, despite being called Black Death, it’s usually easily treatable with strong antibiotics, especially if caught early.
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