Plague rat experiment - Timewatch - BBC

Suspecting that the Black Death was being spread by rat fleas, a brilliant young French doctor called Paul Louis Simond conducted an experiment to see whether a plague rat could transmit the disease to a healthy rat. Fascinating clip from the Timewatch: The Mystery of the Black Death. Watch more high quality videos on the BBC Worldwide YouTube channel here: http://www.youtube.com/bbcworldwide

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• BBC
• Timewatch
• History
• Disease
• Black Death
• Plague
• 14th century

[blizzard242]

@mediabakery Why? that's how effective medical research must be done.

[mediabakery]

i don't like animal experiments

[carnivalchaotic]

@XGrellSebastian There are many other, much more effective methods of conducting testing.

[tigranvartanovitch]

The rat hypothesis is bunkum. The black death has died out. The bubonic plague has not. The black death was a flu-like pandemic like the Sudor Anglicus or the Spanish Influenza. If it were rats that spread the black death, then it would come back again and again. It didn't.

[andy765gtr]

obviously humans were able to spread the plague around in fleas carried on their clothing. rats also have limited dispersal ability compared to humans, who were travelling all over europe during the middle ages and certainly frommvillage to village on a daily basis. rats are largely sedentary and certainly dont roam over hundreds of miles and have the ability to leap over the channel

in light of these obvious facts, why is the rat as main vector of the plague so rarely questioned

[XGrellSebastian]

@mediabakery but if we hadn't done this, how are we supposed to find cures? That is stupid, really

[Zzozze]

@blizzard242 So you assume that the human flea can't spread the disease from one human to another... ok, I have no idea if does or not.

Only funny is that Paul-Louis Simond made his experiment 1898 in India with a flea that was discovered only 5 years later by Nathanael de Rothschild in Egypt and named by him after a pharoah... not so "scientific".

[blizzard242]

@Zzozze Bubonic Plague is a rodent disease and is not human to human endemic. One human can not spread it to another human. The way it is spread is though the rat flea. The fleas feed on a rat, the rat dies, the fleas look for a new host. When people live in the same aria as these rats (as they did in mid-evil Europe) the fleas started to host on humans. The fleas spread the disease from one host to another. If you are referring to Pneumonic plague, yes that can spread person to person.

[Zzozze]

@blizzard242 From man to man: like an epidemy.

Rat-fleas are a reservoir for Yersinia Pestis in the same way the chinese ducks are for Haemophilus influenzae in the seasonal (natural) flu: not all the flu patients are biten by a duck.

If you believe that physicians are always 100% right in their beliefes, just make a research on CCSVI for example. Read the wikipedia article and see on the MS-forums what patients have to say after the got the venoplasty operation.

(even vids on my channel)

[blizzard242]

@Zzozze Are you kidding me? How do you think bubonic plague spread. The plague is spread though bacteria spread from the fleas. Learn some real science then come back and talk.

[Zzozze]

@blizzard242 This was hi-tech medical research 110 years ago ;o)

By the way, parasites are very specie-related: I doubt that rat-fleas really bite humans...