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00:00In 1348, an invisible killer haunted Europe.
00:06The Black Death was one of the most fatal pandemics in human history.
00:11It tore society apart, and its impact is still being felt.
00:16It was one of those really crazy events that almost killed the entire Eurasian population.
00:22Can you imagine having no understanding of germ theory, no science,
00:26no idea what was causing half of the people you know to die?
00:30For centuries, we have studied this catastrophe to try to ensure it can never strike again with such force.
00:36Plague, in common understanding, is a disease of the past,
00:40but the truth is that it's still an infection which is occurring today.
00:45It's very, very important to establish the origins of any disease.
00:50Now, a group of scientists believe an obscure collection of artefacts and graves discovered far from Europe
00:58may hold the key to identifying Black Death patient zero,
01:02the earliest known victim of the 14th century Black Death pandemic.
01:07The year is 1348.
01:23All across Europe, millions of people are falling prey to a mysterious, deadly disease.
01:29Its symptoms are unmistakable.
01:34Fever and chills, body aches and fatigue, and painful swellings in the lymph glands,
01:41in the armpits, neck and groin, known as buboes.
01:46In the final stages of the illness, the victim's fingers and toes turn black.
01:52It is this last symptom that gives the disease its grisly name.
01:58Black Death.
02:05As this sickness sweeps across the continent, piles of bodies line the streets,
02:11and once thriving cities are transformed into desolate ghost towns.
02:17One such city is Siena, in the heart of the Italian peninsula.
02:33Situated on a medieval highway for merchants and pilgrims,
02:36in the 14th century, it was one of Europe's economic powerhouses.
02:41There was some Roman activity on the site,
02:46but the first traces of a Christian city seem to date to the 6th century,
02:50and it grows up from there along with the pilgrimage to Rome.
02:56Even today, Siena remains a mecca for visitors,
03:00a world heritage site,
03:02beloved as an untouched jewel of 13th and 14th century architecture.
03:07But there is a dark story behind why Siena is a city frozen in time.
03:13And that story can be found in the pages of an unparalleled record
03:17of life in the city over the year the Black Death hit.
03:21A journal written by a man called Agnolo di Tura.
03:25Today, Agnolo di Tura's journal is kept at the state archives in the heart of Siena,
03:36overlooking its central square, the Piazza del Campo.
03:44It is looked after by archivist and historian Cinzia Cardenale.
03:49The journal is a collection of original writing by Agnolo,
04:07The journal is a collection of original writing by Agnolo and documents his life as a shoemaker
04:20and a father of five in mid-14th century Siena.
04:27The fact that Agnolo's journal is a personal account rather than an official one gives
04:33a unique insight into conditions in Siena during the Black Death.
04:37Nella parte in cui racconta della peste mette anche delle notazioni personali e poi fa anche riferimento
04:47a una situazione generale, quindi confrontabile con i documenti contemporanei e quindi ovviamente
04:56particolarmente importante.
04:59Agnolo records that the Black Death arrived in the city in May 1348 and was gone by September
05:06of the same year.
05:10Over that short time it decimated not just the population of Siena but that of the entire
05:16surrounding area, thousands of men, women and children.
05:21Noi sappiamo che all'inizio del 300 Siena era una città che grosso modo aveva circa 50.000
05:32abitanti, quindi una capitale al pari delle altre capitali europee.
05:37Agnolo left behind a unique record of the Black Death's devastating impact on the lives
05:45of ordinary Sienese families, which was mirrored all across Europe.
05:49It is found that at this time there died in Siena 36.000 persons, 20 years of age or less,
05:57and the aged and the other people died, to a total of 52.000 in all, in Siena, and in
06:06the suburbs of Siena 28.000 persons died.
06:10And there remained in Siena less than 10.000 men. And those that survived were like persons
06:15distraught and almost without feeling.
06:17This deadly disease was carried into Agnolo's home, like those of countless other people,
06:24who died in Siena in Siena, who died in Siena in Siena in Siena, who died in Siena in Siena.
06:28And there remained in Siena less than 10.000 men. And those that survived were like persons distraught
06:36and almost without feeling.
06:42This deadly disease was carried into Agnolo's home, like those of countless others, by an
06:48almost invisible intruder. Its effect was catastrophic. For individual households and for entire cities
06:58like Siena, the Black Death will change things forever.
07:05The prosperity that Siena enjoyed in the 14th century stemmed principally from banking and
07:20thriving trade networks. Spices, silk, and other luxury goods were imported from as far away
07:30as Asia via the ancient trade route known as the Silk Road.
07:39And Siena was also one of Italy's main stopping points for pilgrims travelling to and from Rome.
07:52Siena develops as an important city because it's on one of the really important routes throughout the Middle Ages.
08:03Perhaps the leading attraction for visiting pilgrims would have been the city's cathedral.
08:09consecrated in the year 1215, it projected civic pride, wealth, and power, drawing throngs of visitors then as now.
08:27The cathedral is not just a symbol of devotion that the faithful have to God and in particular the Virgin Mary,
08:33but it is a way for the city to showcase their economic status and power.
08:40Even today, we can imagine how medieval pilgrims might have felt gazing upon the beauty of the cathedral's interior.
08:50The ornate roof is supported by marble columns striped in white and dark green to mirror the exterior.
08:57And it is decorated with works of art by great masters from all over the Italian peninsula.
09:07Also, it's a showcase of the local artists because Siena really was an artistic centre in the 12 and 1300s,
09:14really on par with that of Florence.
09:16Pilgrims arriving in Siena during the years preceding the Black Death would also have marvelled at the magnificent altarpiece,
09:24a 13th century stained glass window designed by famed local artist Duccio di Buoninsegna,
09:32which is now preserved in the cathedral museum.
09:35Siena's cathedral sits on the pilgrim route known as the Via Francigena.
09:47It ran for 2,000 kilometres from Canterbury in the south of England through modern-day France and Switzerland all the way to Rome.
09:56If you stick to the Via Francigena, you can be pretty sure of a bed for the night because the towns along the way are sort of used to dealing with visitors.
10:06Modern pilgrims to Siena can still walk along streets almost unchanged since Agnolo's day.
10:13What do pilgrims need? You need a place to sleep, a place to eat, a place to drink, a place to pray, perhaps even a place to buy some souvenirs.
10:27And so all along the Via Francigena, which becomes the main thoroughway of Siena, you see Osterie, places to eat.
10:37An Osterie would have been a tavern down below with an inn up above.
10:40And of course you'll see that in the names of many of the establishments that we have there still today.
10:45You would have had churches at which to pray along the way, certain saints to help you along your way to a safe passage to the Holy Land.
10:58In addition to hospitality, Siena provided another service to its many pilgrim and merchant visitors.
11:08The Tuscans evolved the first really effective international banking system.
11:13Siena discovered silver in their territories and that meant that when they went into banking they could offer a sort of guarantee.
11:24You know, they actually had the sort of fiscal reserves to cover it if something went wrong.
11:31Sienese money lenders and merchant bankers facilitated currency exchange, loans and deposits, despite religious bans on usury.
11:40Family run banks issued credit and bills of exchange that enabled long distance trade.
11:47The grand headquarters of Siena's medieval banking industry dominates the city even today.
11:53Siena's appeal to merchants and traders and its prime position on the pilgrim trail is what made it prosperous.
11:58Siena's appeal to merchants and traders and its prime position on the pilgrim trail is what made it prosperous.
12:12But in early 1348, it was that success that made Siena deeply vulnerable, as recorded by Agnolo da Tura in his journal.
12:24The mortality in Siena began in May. It was a cruel and horrible thing.
12:33It seemed that almost everyone became stupefied seeing the pain.
12:37It is impossible for the human tongue to recount the awful truth.
12:43One who did not see such horribleness can be called blessed.
12:47The victims died almost immediately.
12:50They would swell beneath the armpits and in the groin and fall over while talking.
12:55Father abandoned child, wife husband, one brother another.
13:00Father, for this illness, seemed to strike through breath and sight.
13:06And so they died.
13:12And nearby, in the city of Florence, Siena's close neighbor and sworn enemy,
13:18another chronicle of the Black Death was being written.
13:22Not by a shoemaker this time, but by a great author and poet, Giovanni Boccaccio.
13:30At the Bodleian Library in Oxford, curator Matthew Holford is responsible for looking after one of the earliest surviving manuscripts of Boccaccio's most famous work, the Decameron.
13:43So what we have in front of us here is a manuscript of Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron.
13:50It was written in 1467, so it's about 120 years after the date the Decameron itself was written.
13:57It is believed that Boccaccio began writing the Decameron in 1348, the same year that the Black Death ravaged Tuscan cities, including Florence and Siena.
14:15It is probable that both Boccaccio's stepmother and his father, who was Minister of Supply in the Florentine government, themselves succumbed to the plague.
14:26The work tells the story of ten people who meet in Florence's Santa Maria Novella Cathedral, before heading for the hoped-for safety of a country villa.
14:38So what we can see here in the manuscript is the beginning of the first day of the Decameron marked by this very fine initial and just part way down the second column is where Boccaccio starts talking about the arrival of the Black Death into Florence in 1348.
14:56He talks about the different symptoms that it had.
15:03If any blood that knows, it was a manifest sign of inevitable death.
15:10But in men and women alike there appeared at the beginning of the illness certain swellings, either on the groin or under the armpits.
15:22Some were as big as a common apple, others like an egg, some more and some less, and these, the vulgar-named plague boils.
15:41But this terrible disease ravaging Florence and Siena was not entirely new.
15:46Boccaccio and Angelo's descriptions mirror those of at least one previous pandemic.
15:55The same symptoms, the buboes that appeared in the groin, on the neck, and under the armpits, were still seared into the collective memory.
16:05Tales of a plague from some 700 years earlier.
16:09In the sixth century AD, we see it for the first time emerging in a really abrupt kind of large-scale pandemic, the so-called first plague pandemic, the Justinianic plague.
16:26Named after the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian I, the plague of Justinian killed millions across the Mediterranean.
16:34It spread all over the former Roman Empire, that's why we have historical sources telling us about it.
16:40It could well be it was there before, but we just don't have historical records.
16:45But what was this insidious disease?
16:51It wasn't until after another deadly outbreak, this time in China in 1894, that the pathogen responsible for causing Black Death was finally identified.
17:01The physician who isolated it was Alexandre Yersin, and the bacterium was named after him.
17:10Yersinia pestis.
17:13There are three main types of plague, all caused by the same Yersinia pestis bacterium.
17:19They are bubonic, septicemic, and pneumonic.
17:26The most commonly found form of the disease is bubonic plague, which represents about 80% of all cases.
17:34The bacteria transfer into the closest lymph nodes and start to replicate very rapidly.
17:39The individuals who are infected develop really swollen, painful lymph glands, so the glands in the neck and under the armpits and in the groin.
17:50These swellings are called buboes, hence the name bubonic plague.
17:55If left untreated, the results can be deadly.
17:58While anyone contracting bubonic plague still has up to a 40% chance of survival, if left untreated, the Yersinia pestis bacteria can spread from the lymph nodes directly into the bloodstream.
18:13This causes bubonic plague to develop into septicemic plague, a systemic infection which is much more deadly.
18:20This is when the bacteria enter the bloodstream directly, cause sepsis right away.
18:28It's extremely lethal, it can cause death in almost 100% of cases.
18:36Once a patient's bloodstream has been infected with Yersinia pestis, the blood can also carry the bacteria directly into the lungs, causing pneumonic plague.
18:48Pneumonic plague.
18:55Like the septicemic variant, pneumonic plague has almost a 100% fatality rate if left untreated.
19:02But the thing that makes it even more deadly is the fact that it can be spread directly from person to person.
19:09Coughs and sneezes expel tiny aerosol droplets that carry the Yersinia pestis bacteria into the air.
19:16When someone inhales droplets from an infected person, they breathe in the bacteria that causes plague.
19:24The three different types of plague can occur at the same time, both in individuals and in the wider population.
19:32But it is when enough people develop pneumonic plague that the rate of infection soars.
19:37That is then a rapid fire spread of plague. And we think that's what happened in the 1340s when plague arrived in Europe. They spread rapidly between people.
19:49Once plague is present in the population, especially in a densely occupied trading city like Siena, the extremely contagious pneumonic version will spread like wildfire.
20:00It is believed the Black Death may have killed up to 200 million people across Europe and beyond, making it the deadliest pandemic in recorded history.
20:11But when it arrived, how prepared were cities like Siena to combat the contagion?
20:21By the 1340s, Siena was a hotbed of artistic and civic innovation, and it prided itself on good government.
20:36The government of the nine had been established in 1287 as a fair government, which was made up of nine members of the middle class.
20:49These nine members would hold office for two months at a time and spend their terms segregated in the Palazzo Publico to deter corruption.
20:58They bought up and demolished houses in this area until they had a large open space, and they bricked this over to make the campo.
21:11The building of the piazza was a momentous event. Agnolo di Tura described its opening day in 1346.
21:19On December 30th, the paving of the camp was completed, and with the beauty of the fountains and of the buildings round about, it is held to be one of the fairest squares in Italy, and even in Christendom.
21:33Siena saw its greatest economic, political power in the 14th century. Of course, it also saw its greatest architectural and artistic achievements as well.
21:48The government commissioned one of the foremost artists of the day, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, to paint a vast allegory of good and bad government in the Palazzo Publico.
22:03The good government is dressed in the white and black of the Balzana, or the city shield of Siena, and he is surrounded by virtues. The three theological virtues, faith, hope and charity.
22:17In the good city, you have people going about their daily lives. And you have people looking down from their windows to the activities of the street down below.
22:32Conversely, the bad government is represented by a figure of the tyrant, of tyranny. And rather than being surrounded by virtues, they are surrounded by vices.
22:45The buildings are falling apart. The frescoes are literally crumbling.
22:53The allegory of good and bad government was completed in May 1339.
23:00At the time, Siena would have resembled the city run by good government.
23:07Within a few short years, the Black Death would arrive, taking the life of the painter and almost overnight plunging Siena into Lorenzetti's bad city vision of hell.
23:21In Florence, Boccaccio watched the social order break down and despaired of fellow citizens who...
23:28Carouse and make merry, and go about singing and frolicking, and satisfy the appetite in everything possible, and laugh and scoff at whatsoever befell.
23:40As the death toll spiralled out of control, good government collapsed in Siena and across almost all of Europe.
23:48Can you imagine, in 1347, 1348, having no understanding of germ theory, no science, no idea what was causing half of the people you know to die?
24:01If we think about plague in the context of the recent pandemic, the COVID-19 pandemic, which most people are familiar with, that pandemic had a less than 1% mortality.
24:11It spread all over the world. It caused the most incredible economic disruption and the huge societal impact that it had from lockdowns and so on.
24:21At the point that the World Health Organization stopped collecting detailed data on the COVID-19 pandemic in April 2024, there had been just over 700 million recorded cases of the disease around the world.
24:36Of these, seven million people had died.
24:42Today, scholars estimate that up to half of those infected during the Black Death lost their lives.
24:49So we have to imagine plague as an order of magnitude different, with perhaps 50% of the population dead, not less than 1%, and the impact that that must have had on society.
25:02A couple of key questions have plagued historians of the Black Death for hundreds of years.
25:09Where did this 14th century pandemic originate?
25:13And can we ever find its patient zero, the earliest known victim?
25:19One man has made it his life's work to find answers.
25:23Professor Philip Slavin.
25:25I thought to myself, wow, it was one of those really crazy events that almost killed the entire Eurasian population.
25:33And one of the questions that I've been really, really fascinated is the, where did it start? Where did it come from?
25:40Medieval Europe was overwhelmingly an agricultural world of serfs and peasants, working the lands of powerful church and nobility.
25:50But it was also a world of extremely long trade routes and cultural exchange.
25:55We know that in the 14th century, long distance trade was really flourishing all over Eurasia, in different parts of Central Asia, Western Eurasia, the Middle East, Northern Africa, Iran.
26:09But where people can move freely, disease can just as easily follow.
26:14When we're talking about spread of any infectious disease, the most important factor is the movement of people and goods.
26:21The Italian peninsula was a major trade hub for goods and people from across the known world, especially the thriving maritime republics of Tuscany and Northern Italy.
26:32Merchants from Venice, Genoa and Pisa sailed as far afield as Crimea on the northern shore of the Black Sea.
26:40The Black Sea region was very, very important, the supplier of grain to Europe at that point.
26:48So Venetians and Genoese had commercial hubs all over Crimea.
26:53They were using those hubs in order to trade, primarily in grain but also in slaves, with local traders.
27:01But trade often resulted in conflict.
27:07In 1343 there was a clash between the Tatars and the Italians.
27:13The Italian republics established colonies over nearly half a century of trading in Crimea.
27:19But violence eventually erupted between the settlers and the Tatars.
27:24Local Italian populations had to flee for their lives and they ended up in the Venetian trade port of Caffa.
27:33There is evidence to suggest that by 1345 plague was already circulating around Crimea.
27:41And it's possible that the Siege of Caffa in the same year was the most likely first contact between Europeans and the strain of the plague that would, in a few short years, devastate the continent.
28:00There's one very, very dramatic description of one Italian chronicle called Gabriele de Musis, who alleged that the Mongols and the Tatars failing to besiege Caffa, they resorted to what can be interpreted as the early example of biological warfare.
28:20They started actually catapulting the infected bodies of the soldiers over the walls of the Caffa fortress, helping actually to infect those people.
28:32And they did the trick.
28:34In 1347, with the Siege of Caffa over, Crimean grain was once again shipped into Italian ports.
28:52But the grain ships carried a stowaway as vicious as it was small.
28:58Rats carrying fleas nestled amongst the cargo.
29:08And some human passengers were already infected.
29:13In September 1347, they arrived in Messina in Sicily.
29:17That's the introduction of the Black Death into Europe.
29:20That was the other port of entry into Europe.
29:25One by one, Italian port towns and cities fell to the Black Death.
29:30By late 1347, the disease had been reported in Genoa and Venice, and all the way to the Middle East.
29:38By the following year, it spread up through southern Europe to Germany and France, and across to England.
29:44In the ravaged cities, even without an understanding of germ theory,
29:50observers recognised that the movement of people was connected to the spread of disease.
29:56Boccaccio was critical of those who left infected cities for the country, potentially carrying the plague with them.
30:03In this passage here, we can see Boccaccio talking about what he calls more cruel or more barbarous people who left the city.
30:15Fierce and conceits were begotten in those who remained alive.
30:25Who almost all came to a very barbarous conclusion.
30:30Namely, to shun and flee from the sick.
30:34And in so doing, thought to secure immunity for themselves.
30:47In Mediterranean Europe, authorities took the lead in implementing a policy to halt the spread of the plague.
30:53One that we still use today.
30:55And which revolved around the use of quarantine and isolation to try and immobilise the plague.
31:03Quarantine did emerge as a practice that was particularly associated with Mediterranean ports early on,
31:10which makes sense because these were really on the front line of the arrival of the plague from ships,
31:16for the movement of people and goods and animals and so forth.
31:20And one place in particular is known to have pioneered the practice of isolating the infected from the healthy.
31:28Dubrovnik, known in this period as Ragusa.
31:32The Adriatic port was the earliest place that instituted quarantine measures.
31:37And that established two different islands as places for people to go to if they were coming from a place that had seen infection.
31:47But also, increasingly, if there were cases within the city or the surrounding area, people were sent to these islands.
31:55But just like today, knowing whether these measures work or not can be difficult to determine.
32:02I think in terms of measuring the success of quarantine, the parallel of COVID-19 is really, really relevant.
32:10Because that's what I guess what we were doing in Europe before the vaccine.
32:17And we could still see the pandemic raging around us.
32:23But there's a bigger question about how much worse the situation would have been if we hadn't all suddenly stayed at home.
32:32As the Black Death tore through Europe, people and physicians scrambled desperately to understand and combat the disease.
32:44Even though they may not have known what was killing them, they were trying to explain the disease as best they could.
32:52Plague was believed to be transmitted through corrupt air or miasma.
32:58The best way to understand it is corrupt or poisoned air.
33:02This idea that illness is not just something that originates inside the body, but it is also something that happens through external factors.
33:11And air can become corrupt in its essence.
33:16For us, miasma may be best compared to our concept of contamination.
33:22So air that smelt bad or air that was visibly polluted by fumes or smoke.
33:30Water was central to medieval understanding of how plague spread.
33:36And it was believed that a supply of fresh water was integral to preventing the spread of the disease.
33:45In a city like Siena, that was a potential problem.
33:49Siena's real problem is that it's about a thousand feet above the nearest source of water, which is a lot.
33:57Siena is near the source of several rivers that become major rivers, but not while they're near Siena.
34:03But there was a solution.
34:07In the years leading up to the Black Death, the Sienese had completed a major project to bring fresh running water to its population.
34:16Engineers carved 25 kilometers of tunnels into the ground beneath Siena.
34:22This artificial underground river carried fresh water from nearby springs into the heart of the city.
34:29And gave the inhabitants of Siena some comfort, however misplaced, that their water would not bring them harm from the plague.
34:39But in other parts of Europe, communal water sources became the focus of dangerous conspiracy theories.
34:48In places like England and Germany, there were widespread accusations that the Black Death was deliberately spread by local Jewish communities, who, it was alleged, were poisoning wells.
35:02These lies fueled anti-Semitic violence across the continent, and thousands of Jews were tragically murdered as a result.
35:13The fate of European Jews during the Black Death illustrates how misinformation about the origins of a pandemic can have a devastating social impact.
35:27Despite limitations in understanding the spread of disease, physicians across Europe did offer treatments to those who contracted the Black Death.
35:38So we have here a manuscript that dates from the 15th to 16th centuries.
35:44It was produced in northern and central France over an extended period.
35:53Although this book was written during later outbreaks, the treatments it details would have been handed down from the 14th century Black Death pandemic.
36:05The manuscript I have in front of me as an artifact that reveals how people lived with plague in the decades and centuries following the very first outbreak of the mid-14th century,
36:16and the manner in which it became part of people's everyday life, part of the culture of Europe.
36:23In many places, the plague returned every few years, making it a day-to-day concern, best compared to the coronavirus or the flu.
36:34So having ways to prevent and treat the infection was paramount.
36:40Towards the end of the volume, we have large numbers of medical remedies and specifically treatments against epidemic illness.
36:50So the heading here in Latin is contra epidemiam, against epidemic.
36:56And the treatments are written in both Latin and French.
37:00This treatment is a medicinal water based on rose water, vinegar and other ingredients.
37:09It is meant to be drunk by the patient and it's a preventive treatment to prevent them from developing the plague.
37:16Here I have another recipe against epidemic illness.
37:22It's a list of ingredients and quantities, many, many different plant ingredients that are meant to be dried and made into a powder,
37:32but then can then be added to water and either drunk by the patient or applied to their body as a medicinal water that enters the body through the pores of the skin.
37:43These treatments may seem unlikely to be of much help,
37:48but they may not be as far removed from modern medicine as we think.
37:53There's a huge amount of overlap here with modern day treatments,
37:56to the extent that modern day scientific researchers are very interested in medieval remedies.
38:02But sometimes the treatment could be almost as bad as the illness itself.
38:09Bloodletting was a treatment. It was understood that bloodletting would expel the corruption of the plague from the body.
38:17Meaning that there was a possibility that you might recover.
38:21But while some treatments may appear ineffectual and barbaric,
38:25medieval people did have some understanding of how to prevent disease spreading.
38:31There was a whole system of knowledge about medicine that was based on observation.
38:37So people would observe, for example, that a hospital ward that was dirty would be a space in which there was ready disease transmission.
38:48And so they would respond and they would keep that space clean.
38:51And so many aspects of medieval behavior in relation to illness, and then specifically in relation to plague,
38:58actually aligns with things that we would do today.
39:01I think if we were to suggest that people just ignored cleanliness because they didn't have the scientific understanding that we have now,
39:10that simply wouldn't be true.
39:14Despite attempts to treat and prevent the spread of the Black Death,
39:18it continued to spread across Europe like wildfire.
39:22So rapid was the rate with which the infected died that there wasn't time to give each victim an individual burial.
39:29Bodies lined the streets, and solutions to bury the dead needed to be found.
39:36In Siena, Agnolo di Tura described the consequences of the devastating speed with which people succumbed to the disease.
39:48In many places in Siena, great pits were dug and piled deeper with the multitude of dead.
39:54And they died by the hundreds, both day and night,
39:57and all were thrown in those ditches and covered with earth.
40:01And as soon as those ditches were filled, more were dug.
40:07By the time the Black Death pandemic waned,
40:10it is believed that over 200 million people had been killed by the plague.
40:16In the centuries that followed, the disease would periodically reemerge,
40:21infecting people in their thousands before subsiding again.
40:27Even today, there are still regular outbreaks across the globe.
40:33Plague, I think, in common understanding, is a disease of the past.
40:37But the truth is that it's still an infection which is occurring today in humans.
40:43And there are a large outbreak in Madagascar just before 2019, about 2017.
40:51And we also see sporadic cases in various parts of Africa, in Russia, in China, and in the United States every year.
40:59For many years, it was known that the Black Death had first entered into Europe through the Sicilian port of Messina,
41:07and that it had likely traveled there on cargo ships carrying infected rats and people from the Crimean Peninsula on the Black Sea.
41:15But beyond that, the Black Death's true point of origin has remained a mystery.
41:21To help prevent any potential future pandemic outbreak, it's crucial to pinpoint where the deadliest outbreak of plague originated.
41:31To understand exactly how pandemics are initiated is really important for us to actually be better defended against future pandemics.
41:43Professor Philip Slavin has made it his quest to locate Black Death Patient Zero, the first known human victim of the catastrophic 14th century outbreak.
41:53It's very, very important to establish the origins of any disease.
41:59Philip believes that he is close to tracing the Black Death beyond Crimea, to discover where it may have first made the jump from rodents to humans.
42:09Patient Zero is the first human carrier of an infectious disease.
42:14The same person, he or she, would receive bacteria or viruses from the wildlife reservoir, in other words, from animals.
42:25And in such capacity, the same person, he or she, would be responsible for transmitting the same bacteria or viruses to wider human population.
42:36In other words, we're talking about the missing link between the wildlife reservoir and wider human communities.
42:41Philip is combining his own historical detective work with that of a team of scientific experts.
42:51Together, they are tracking a collection of human remains and enigmatic artifacts across Britain, Europe and beyond.
43:04In the hope of being the first to uncover Black Death Patient Zero.
43:11Does anyone know the origin of this?
43:12This is an interesting part of both the most prominent public evidence-based human beings and in the world of art.
43:14Finally, people who live and anyone who have chosen a human being and that of a team of幸福 over many years.
43:20This is a great episode of the progresses, and the history of the two generations of dust is far from 300% along the river.
43:24They are used to be found on the history of the beneficiary of the future.
43:26They are a more fortunate than the people of scientists who have chosen up the map of the lake.
43:29This has to be an important part of our planet.
43:32One of the most common species of this is a peak year-based human beings.
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