Rats "blamed" for plague outbreak in Glasgow in 1900

New research finally established the cause of a plague outbreak in Glasgow nearly 120 years ago.

A team from the University of Oslo said the rats had been falsely accused and that the real culprits were humans.

The plague struck Glasgow in August 1900. The first cases took place in the middle of overcrowded and unsanitary Gorbal dwellings.

The outbreak was part of the third plague pandemic, which began in 1855 and had not been declared until 1960.

Is slightly cleared

The first pandemic was Justinian's plague and the second was the Black Death in the 1300s.

The third pandemic killed millions of people, mainly in China and India.

Judging by these terrible standards, Glasgow has done relatively well with 35 people infected and 16 people killed.

Drastic measures have been used to stop the epidemic.

Calls were made for the disinfection of trams, ferries and even coins, and hundreds of rats were killed by a small army of exterminators.

Killing rats was a fashionable solution at the time.

"The parasites of humanity"

Two years ago, French researcher Paul-Louis Simond showed how rat fleas can transmit the plague bacillus Yersinia pestis.

The public health authorities in Glasgow had doubts, and suspicious people, not rodents, pbaded it on.

They found no sign of plague in the rat population and concluded that the disease could have spread directly between humans, perhaps because they described in an almost poetic way as "parasites suctorials of humanity ".

Today, 119 years later, an Oslo study published in the journal Royal Society Open Science concludes that the infection has actually been transmitted through human contact.

Lead author, Katharine Dean, and colleagues at the Center for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis of the University, said they were able to reach their conclusions thanks to the painstaking records kept by the health authorities of the country. 39; era.

In 1900, the authorities noted that almost all cases could be preceded by a precedent.

Despite the trapping of hundreds of rats, which abounded in shanty towns, they found no evidence of a rodent outbreak.

Day zero

The city's medical officer of health immediately began an investigation into the spread of the disease.

He established August 3, 1900 as the zero day, noting that it was at the time when "Mrs. B, a fish merchant", had become the first to get sick, along with her granddaughter.

The authorities then searched for persons related to Ms B or having attended her wake.

This led to the quarantine of more than 100 people in a "home" for the purpose of observation.

With the support of the Catholic Church, revivals following death due to the plague were banned.

The new study used modern methods to develop historical data, discovering a high rate of secondary infections within households.

The incubation period of each infection also indicated transmission from one person to another.

The authors stated that their findings provided important insight into the epidemiology of an outbreak of bubonic plague during the third pandemic in Europe.

It also confirmed what the authorities had suspected all these years: the Glasgow rats had a bad reputation.