Month: September 2022

Beyond Catalonia: pro-independence movements in Europe View in LinkedIn

GENOME MODIFICATION. “The plague did write itself into human genomes: The descendants of plague-affected populations share certain changes in some immune genes.” https://lnkd.in/ggGWR4A View in LinkedIn

IMMUNE STRENGTHENING. “Netea and his colleagues tested the ability of the toll-like receptors to react to Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that caused the Black Death. They found that the strength of the immune response varied depending on the exact sequence of the toll-like receptor genes.” https://lnkd.in/gWy9UtF View in LinkedIn

GENETIC SELECTION BY PLAGUE. “The identification of the immune pathways and genetic variants that were specifically selected in Europe not only helps us to understand the evolutionary history of European populations, but also contributes to our understanding of the differences in susceptibility between European and other populations to modern human diseases.” https://lnkd.in/gcJ7VHH View in LinkedIn

POSITIVE IMPACT OF DEPOPULATION. “With as much as half of the population dead, survivors in the post-plague era had more resources available to them. Historical documentation records an improvement in diet, especially among the poor.” https://lnkd.in/ggGWR4A View in LinkedIn

PRE- AND POST-PLAGUE. “Given that the mortality associated with the Black Death was extraordinarily high and selective, the medieval epidemic might have powerfully shaped patterns of health and demography in the surviving population, producing a post-Black Death population that differed in many significant ways, at least over the short term, from the population that existed just before the epidemic.” https://lnkd.in/g2FqTm7 View in LinkedIn

NATURAL SELECTION. “By targeting frail people of all ages, and killing them by the hundreds of thousands within an extremely short period of time, the Black Death might have represented a strong force of natural selection and removed the weakest individuals on a very broad scale within Europe.” https://lnkd.in/g2FqTm7 View in LinkedIn

FRAILTY REDUCTION. “In particular, given that reproductive-aged individuals with relatively high frailty (i.e. an individual's risk of death relative to other members of the population) were more likely to die during the Black Death than their age-peers with lower frailty, the epidemic might have affected genetic variation with respect to disease susceptibility or immune competence and thus, acted to reduce average levels of frailty in the surviving population.” https://lnkd.in/g2FqTm7 View in LinkedIn

STRENGTHENED SECOND RESPONSE. “This might explain why, according to historical documents, medieval plague mortality declined steeply between the initial outbreak in 1347–1351 and the second outbreak in 1361 and why mortality levels remained lower in subsequent plague outbreaks throughout the medieval and early modern periods.” https://lnkd.in/gGtSd3Y View in LinkedIn

SOCIAL IMPACT. “In 1348, the Black Death swept across Europe and killed nearly 50% of the population. Immediately prices for labor, livestock, and consumables skyrocketed and governments everywhere ground to a halt. England was no exception as King Edward III had the additional concern of paying for his military campaigns against France during the opening phase of the Hundred Years War (1337-1453).” https://lnkd.in/g5DRQJ8 View in LinkedIn