Plague's Been Killing for 6,000 Years

Doctors make the point over and over that any epidemic of any disease is just a flight away. People carry germs from place to place with them. West Nile virus was never seen in the Western Hemisphere until 1999, when someone or something carried the virus to New York and it spread from Queens to the entire country in just a few years.

“This branch descends directly from the strain circulating in both London and Barcelona during the Black Death.”

Zika virus has traveled around the world from Africa and is currently infecting millions of people in Latin America, the south Pacific and southeast Asia – and a single infected traveler could easily have been the vector.

The same thing happened in medieval times and evencalled buboes that characterized infection.

Pneumonic plague, an infection of the lungs, can spread from one person to another. It's sometimes spread from animals to people that way, also.

Plague also causes a systemwide infection called septicemic plague. Untreated bubonic and pneumonic plague both can progress to septicemia and that's what usually kills people.

"Our study is the first to provide genetic support for plague's travel from Europe into Asia after the Black Death, and it establishes a link between the Black Death in the mid-14th century and modern plague,” Spyrou said in a statement.

“Evidence is accumulating to support the idea that plague was hiding somewhere locally within Europe for several centuries after the Black Death” added Kirsten Bos, molecular paleopathologist at the Max Planck Institute. "The reasons for its disappearance