Rats are innocent!

I’m always a little suspicious of articles which say things like ‘scientists say…’ ‘scientists claim that…’ ‘research suggests…’ My father and my uncle were scientists and I guess I’m a little cynical of these headline grabbing science news items.

However, however, as a family who used to have pet rats, beautiful, intelligent, clean, polite fancy rats, I was quite pleased to see a news item which claims that gerbils not rats were responsible for the Black Death  which almost literally decimated Europe in the fourteenth century. It originated in Asia, and was first seen in Europe in 1347 when it’s arrival caused one of the deadliest epidemics in human history; for the next 400 years, the disease returned many times, and many, many millions, countless millions dies.

It’s a complicated story, but gerbils, giant gerbils not rats seem to have been the culprits; climate played its part and it is through examining the climate from the past,evidenced in such things as tree rings, a Norwegian professor, Nils Christian Stenseth, has come to this conclusion. He published his findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and is planning to continue his research at the University of Oslo by examining the DNA of plague victims.

Tragically the plague is not just a disease of the past, nearly a hundred and thirty people died of it in 2013… But rats are innocent!

http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-31588671