Black Death Was Not Spread by Rat Fleas, Say Researchers
31st March 2014
Analysis of the bodies and of wills registered in London at the time has cast doubt on “facts” that every schoolchild has learned for decades: that the epidemic was caused by a highly contagious strain spread by the fleas on rats.
Now evidence taken from the human remains found in Charterhouse Square, to the north of the City of London, during excavations carried out as part of the construction of the Crossrail train line, have suggested a different cause: only an airborne infection could have spread so fast and killed so quickly.
March 31st, 2014 at 10:57
I took a course on epidemic disease in 1996 and this was presented as commonly-held belief about the reason the Black Death mortality was so high. Books on the subject published in the popular press in the 1970’s did the same (William McNeill’s first edition of *Plagues and Peoples*, which presents pneumonic plague as one of the causes of the Black Death was published in 1977). I clicked through and the Guardian article and found the following comment:
Guardian Pick
No, it’s a story because now the pneumonic hypothesis can be proven through examination of the remains.
Now that’s news, and useful news at that. You’d have thought the Guardian article would have stressed that.