Presentations on the Plague from the European Association of Archaeologists, Vilnius, Lithuania, 2016

I just discovered that most of the presentations from the "Plague in Diachronic and Interdisciplinary Perspective" session of the Europan Association of Archaeologists meeting in Vilnius, Lithuania on 2 September 2016 are now on YouTube.  I think I have collected them all here. Enjoy 3 hours of plague talks! Introduction-Plague in diachronic and Interdisciplinary perspective by...

Rivers in European Plague Outbreak Patterns, 1347-1760

by Michelle Ziegler The era of big data is coming to historic epidemiology. A new study published this month in Scientific Reports took a database of 5559 European outbreak reports (81.9% from UK, France, and Germany) between 1347 and 1760 to analyze the role of rivers in the incidence and spread of plague. Their hypothesis...

Expanding the Historical Plague Paradigm

When the first complete genomic sequence of Yersinia pestis was published on October 4, 2001 the world was naturally focused elsewhere, on anthrax bioterrorism -- the Amerithrax incident was then in its second week-- and the September 11 attacks were just over three weeks old. As the world redeveloped bioterrorism assessments and plans, plague was...

General Principles of Zoonotic Landscape Epidemiology

Zoonoses, pathogens with animal reservoirs, exist as part of a complex system of interactions between animal reservoirs, vectors, ecological factors and human interaction. Landscape epidemiology has existed as a field of study since Russian epidemiologist E.N. Pavlovsky coined the term and laid the groundwork in the 1960s. Landscape epidemiology is in essence the study of...

Western Iranian Plague Foci Still Active, 2011-2012

In a letter in this month's Emerging Infectious Diseases, an Iranian and French team of epidemiologists report that the old plague focus in western Iran bordering Kurdistan is still active. Between 1947 and 1966 there were nine human plague epidemics causing 156 human deaths.  The last recorded human case occurred in 1966 and in animals...

Fleshing out Yersinia pestis

by Michelle Ziegler Up until a few months ago there were a few representative samples of the Yersinia pestis genome. Important windows into its secrets, but windows none the less. In January a Chinese group remedied this situation by expanding the number of fully sequenced genomes from 15 to 133 (Cui et al, 2013).  China...

Reactivation of Ancient Plague Foci in Libya, 2009

Plague has been called a re-emerging disease primarily because cases have begun to appear in areas where plague has been absent for decades. Two recent surprising outbreaks occurred in Algeria, where plague had been absent for over 50 years, and in Libya after a 25 year absence. A team led by the Institut Pasteur explored...

Toward a Molecular History of Yersinia pestis (AHA)

This post a resource for the presentation I gave at the AHA meeting in New Orleans on January 5, 2013. A color handout of the slides can be downloaded here. This map will be continually updated as new finds are published. Some of the balloons mark sites with multiple studies. Click on the balloons for...

AHA 2013: The Power of Cartography: Remapping the Black Death in the Age of Genomics and GIS

This coming year's American Historical Association meeting will be held in New Orleans, Jan 2 - Jan 6, 2013. The schedule went online within about the last day. I'll be at the AHA meeting for the first time this year at this session. The links below are to the session and individual speaker abstracts. I...