Erabaru.net. The Black Death was a terrible and contagious virus that destroyed up to half of the population centuries ago, but scientists have recently discovered that it can still impact our health even 700 years after it appeared.
Imagine what life was like in the mid-1300s, if you can.
The country is in chaos, ruled by an unelected leader with little or no understanding of the concept of democracy, a pandemic that is engulfing the population and leaving others to live in fear and a staggering inequality between rich and poor in society.
Hard to imagine, right?
However, the pandemic at the time was the worst imaginable: the Black Death.
Estimates suggest that as many as 200 million people have died from this disease, with those who survived – for lack of modern medicine – doing it by ‘grace of God’ or rather the peculiarity of genetic mutations.
Now, a very complicated DNA analysis has found that the same mutation that helped people defeat the Black Death is linked to the autoimmune disorders that people suffer from today.
Interesting stuff, right?
The suspicion among researchers is that such an important event in human history must have had an effect on evolution.
Those who survived must have something that those who died did not have, in short.
Then, by extracting 206 teeth from the skeletons of Black Death victims, they were able to pinpoint whether their owners died before, after or during the pandemic.
They found that if a person had the correct genetic mutation, they had a 40% chance of surviving the plague.
The gene in question is called ERAP2, and people who survive pass the mutation on to their children.
If you’re lucky, you’ll get them from both, leading to a highly functional version.
“It’s huge, it’s a very large effect, it’s really amazing to find something like this in the human genome,” Professor Luis Barreiro of the University of Chicago told BBC News.
Another researcher, Professor Hendrik Poinar, called it “the strongest selection event in humans to date”.
To find out what they were doing, an experiment was conducted using Yersinia pestis, the bacterium responsible for the outbreak.
Professor Poinar described it as “like watching the Death Star unfold in a Petri dish”.
After all, 700 years later it appears that mutations – now much more common – are linked to autoimmune diseases like Crohn’s disease, meaning that while our ancestors prevented epidemics with their genetics, they could cost us today.
Professor Barreiro said: “Those scars from the past still affect our susceptibility to disease today, in truly remarkable ways.”
However, we cannot expect the same to happen with Covid-19.
The virus has mainly killed the parents, who will no longer have children and therefore will no longer pass on their genes.
It is the Death Star’s ability to kill almost anyone that makes it a selection event of such impact.
So strong that we can still calculate the consequences 700 years later.
Source: ladbible
