Science Daily February 24, 2023
The historical epidemiology of plague is controversial due to the scarcity and ambiguity of available data. By phylogenetic analysis an international team of researchers (Canada, Denmark, USA – Indiana University, Rutgers, University of South Carolina, Australia) has revealed that the Danish Y. pestis sequences were interspersed with those from other European countries, rather than forming a single cluster, indicative of the generation, spread, and replacement of bacterial variants through communities rather than their long-term local persistence. These results provide an epidemiological link between Y. pestis and the unknown pestilence that afflicted medieval and early modern Europe. They demonstrated how population-scale genomic evidence can be used to test hypotheses on disease mortality and epidemiology and help pave the way for the next generation of historical disease research… read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLEÂ