#DNA from 4,000-year-old #plague discovered—the oldest cases to date in Britain.

#Yersinia #genomics #anthropology #epidemiology #yapC #ymt

https://phys.org/news/2023-05-dna-year-old-plague-discoveredthe-oldest.html

Interesting study showing balance between bacterial & host factors determining granuloma formation and control of infection. This example being #Yersinia.
#granuloma #immunology #academia #Science #ScienceMastodon

Inflammatory monocytes promote granuloma control of Yersinia infection | Nature Microbiology

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-023-01338-6?utm_source=nmicrobiol_etoc&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=toc_41564_8_4&utm_content=20230404

'Altogether, our study identifies an unappreciated site of Yersinia colonization within the murine intestinal mucosa, and reveals an essential function for inflammatory monocytes in maintainance of pyogranuloma architecture during Yp infection.'
fm @BrodskyLab et al

#InfetionImmunity #Plague #Yersinia #Immunology #InnateImmunity

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-023-01338-6

'Altogether, our study identifies an unappreciated site of Yersinia colonization within the murine intestinal mucosa, and reveals an essential function for inflammatory monocytes in maintainance of pyogranuloma architecture during Yp infection.'
fm @BrodskyLab et al

#InfetionImmunity #Plague #Yersinia #Immunology #InnateImmunity

Yersiniomics, a Multi-Omics Interactive Database for #Yersinia Species | Microbiology Spectrum

https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/spectrum.03826-22

Deadly waves: Researchers document the evolution of #plague over hundreds of years in medieval Denmark.

#epidemics #Yersinia

https://phys.org/news/2023-02-deadly-document-evolution-plague-hundreds.html

Hey, #MedMastodon #HistoryMastodon #MedHistory, got a question for you!

So my med students seem to enjoy my end-of-class babbling on medical history/oddities to the point that they are now demanding it (I have made it clear they wont get any extra credit because of this and still they insist so I assume their interest is sincere 😂 ).
I usually say ok and ask for a subject. This week they suggested the #BlackDeath (don't ask why).
So I mushed together a few ideas. I concluded with the interaction of #Yersinia pestis and #FMF, bringing the subject back on track (#ClinicalImmunology).

Now I was reviewing some facts and I saw this paper (10.1136/pgmj.2004.024075) by Duncan and Smith on the #PostgraduateMedicalJournal #PMJ. They make quite a case for the underlying cause of the #Plague being some sort of virus, possibly a haemorrhagic fever.
One of the arguments is the selection of yet another variant that might protect against disease - in their proposed model its CCR5-delta32 which protects against HIV-1 and seems to have had a substancial boost in prevalence during the same period of the Bubonic Plague.

I had never heard of this. I found a lot of news reports from the early 2000s on this but seems to have faded away since then as a theory.

I still found it very interesting. Does anyone have any new information on this?
I am aware of the recent isolation of Y pestis and the 2022 Nature paper, but could these two agents not have coexisted, for instance?