00:00Rats. They're gross trash eaters that spread diseases like the Black Death way back in the 1300s, right?
00:09Well, a new study reveals that plague animals like rodents, which are often called reservoirs since they can retain bacteria in themselves and in their fleas for long periods of time,
00:17might not have had the environmental factors needed to contribute so heavily to a disease which killed between 30 to 50% of the human population of Europe at the time.
00:26Scientists aren't sure exactly why, but certain environmental factors tend to change the ability of rodent plague reservoirs to spread their diseases.
00:33Certain minerals and metals, like magnesium and copper, as well as a high pH in soil are contributors, as well as cooler temperatures, higher altitudes, and rainfall.
00:41These don't line up well with the areas that were worst affected by the Black Death way back when, so what was the reason?
00:46Well, experts are now saying that while Europe no doubt had short-term plague reservoirs, they likely needed to be repeatedly seeded,
00:52with the researchers finding that persistent plague reservoirs were much more likely to survive in Asia,
00:57meaning they could have been reseeded again and again for the duration of the plague.
01:00Diseases spread by rats tend to move more slowly than those spread by humans,
01:04and the Black Death moved far more quickly over land than even modern-day outbreaks do before airplanes even existed,
01:10meaning the idea that rats were the primary spreaders of the Black Death may be ancient history.
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