The plague — which in the mid-14th century was also known as the Black Death — devastated swaths of Europe, killing millions in under a decade. One of the puzzles surrounding this ancient ...

Body lice may have helped spread bubonic plague. A study suggests that body lice are capable of transmitting Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes plague. June 1, 2024 More than 1 year ago ...

A change to a single gene in the bacterium Yersinia pestis has enabled one of the world’s most notorious pathogens to survive for centuries.

Reducing the copies of one gene in the bubonic plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, made it less deadly but potentially more transmissible ...

In cases of plague since the late 1800s—including an outbreak in Madagascar in 2017—rats and other rodents helped spread the disease. If Y. pestis infects rats, the bacterium can pass to fleas ...

The oldest confirmed case of the illness shows the bubonic plague circulated in North Africa thousands of years before the ...

Nile rats and Black Death: Mummy reveals bubonic plague in Egypt 3,290 years ago. ... The bubonic plague is infamous for causing rapid and widespread deaths across Europe during the 14th century.

The bubonic plague is caused by Yersinia pestis, a bacterium that was likely first introduced in North America around 1900 from rats on ships coming from South Asia, according to Timothy Brewer, M ...

Bubonic plague killed an estimated 25 million people across Europe in the Middle Ages from 1347 to 1351. The Y. pestis bacterium naturally cycles between rodents like rats and the fleas that bite ...

In 1900, plague was introduced on rat-infested ships that sailed from affected areas, causing epidemics in port cities such as San Francisco, where racist public health policies wrongly blamed the ...

The bubonic plague is the most common form of the bacterial infection, which spreads naturally among rodents like prairie dogs and rats. There are two other forms of the plague: septicemic plague ...