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Plague history shows how a pandemic's course can be shaped - CNN

Plague history shows how a pandemic's course can be shaped - CNN

Plague history shows how a pandemic's course can be shaped - CNN
Oct 19, 2020 1 min, 31 secs

But this was not simply a case of the disease becoming more virulent -- evolutionary geneticist Hendrik Poinar told CNN that while the spread of the disease accelerated, genetic analysis to date tentatively suggests that it may have become less infectious.

"When there are shifts in the epidemiology of the disease, most of the shifts that occur can be translated to human intervention or things that go on outside of the actual genetics of the bug," Poinar, a professor in the department of anthropology at McMaster and a co-author of the study, said.

The estimated speed of the epidemics, coupled with what we know about the biology of the plague, suggested that plague did not spread primarily through human-to-human contact during these centuries, but instead, growth rates for early and late epidemics are more consistent with bubonic plague, transmitted by the bites of infected fleas, the researchers said.

Researchers believe that factors including population density, living conditions and cooler temperatures could go toward explaining the acceleration of the disease in London -- and could help with our understanding of modern pandemics, such as the current Covid-19 pandemic.

"A given pathogen can cause very different epidemics, whether it's in the same place over time, or in different places," Earn explained.

"The characteristics of the community can strongly influence the pattern of the epidemic," he said.

"And of course, the behavioral response of individuals can also influence the pattern of the epidemic," he added.

The findings could also provide a blueprint to how the current pandemic and future pandemics could behave.

"Plague never went away and it won't ever go away, and (SARS) CoV-2 will never go away," Poinar told CNN, explaining that the virus, like the plague, has "natural reservoirs" in the population.

"Fortunately we have a phenomenal scientific community, you know across the globe, working ...

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