The Black Death is one of the most severe pandemics in human history with the. bubonic plague wiping out upto half of the European population in the 14th century. ;.
The plague was caused by a bacterium, Yersinia pestis, traditionally believed to have spread through rats or flea bites. However, recent research, suggests a potential role for human body lice in spreading the plague quickly. Although body lice are seen as vectors for typhus and trench fever, the theory of lice as potent vectors of plague was soon abandoned as lice were observed to be ineffective in spreading the plague to humans. .
However, researchers at the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Hamilton revisited the efficiency of body lice at spreading the plague, revealing intriguing new findings.
The team designed a setup mimicking human skin with membranes the body lice could puncture to get a blood meal. The blood infected with Yersinia pestis that the lice fed on developed infections that lasted about a week.
In mosquitos, the malarial parasite Plasmodium lives in the salivary glands. Body lice have a similar mechanism in which the plague-causing bacteria concentrated in certain glands called Pawlowsky glands. These glands help in extending the mouth parts of the lice. These lice could transmit adequate amounts of Yersinia pestis through bites and feeding for three hours. The other set of lice had a reservoir of the bacteria in their guts and needed a twenty-hour feeding period to transmit the plague.
This study sheds a new light on the possible mechansims of various plague outbreaks over the years and suggests that body lice might have played a more significant role in them than previously considered.
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