{"id":9607,"date":"2025-06-03T21:44:24","date_gmt":"2025-06-04T02:44:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/?p=9607"},"modified":"2025-06-03T21:44:29","modified_gmt":"2025-06-04T02:44:29","slug":"black-death-plague-that-killed-millions-became-less-fatal-because-of-this-genetic-tweak","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/2025\/06\/03\/black-death-plague-that-killed-millions-became-less-fatal-because-of-this-genetic-tweak\/","title":{"rendered":"Black Death Plague That Killed Millions Became Less Fatal because of This Genetic Tweak"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"panel body-content\"><div class=\"panel__container\">\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\/article\/black-death-plague-bacterium-became-less-fatal-thanks-to-just-one-genetic\/\">Scientific American<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Reducing the copies of one gene in the bubonic plague bacterium,\u00a0<em>Yersinia pestis,\u00a0<\/em>made it less deadly but potentially more transmissible. A small genetic change makes the bacterium that caused the plague less fatal but possibly more transmissible, allowing for greater disease spread in smaller populations, a study in&nbsp;<em>Science<\/em>&nbsp;reports.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The bacterium&nbsp;<em>Yersinia pestis<\/em>&nbsp;caused the Black Death \u2014 killing up to 50 million people in the mid-fourteenth century \u2014 as well as an earlier plague across the Mediterranean in the sixth century ad . The bacteria still circulate in low levels in parts of the United States, Africa and Asia, and are typically transmitted to humans by infected fleas carried by rats or other rodents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Previous research found that some strains of&nbsp;<em>Y. pestis<\/em>&nbsp;had reduced amounts of&nbsp;<em>pla<\/em>, a gene associated with disease severity, but it was unclear why, says Ravneet Sidhu, a palaeogeneticist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, and a co-author of the latest work. \u201cOur findings in this study characterize a case in which a pandemic-causing pathogen has independently evolved to cause what we believe is a slightly weaker form of the disease,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\/article\/black-death-plague-bacterium-became-less-fatal-thanks-to-just-one-genetic\/\">Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Scientific American Reducing the copies of one gene in the bubonic plague bacterium,\u00a0Yersinia pestis,\u00a0made it less deadly but potentially more transmissible. A small genetic change makes the bacterium that caused the plague less fatal but possibly more transmissible, allowing for greater disease spread in smaller populations, a study in&nbsp;Science&nbsp;reports. The bacterium&nbsp;Yersinia pestis&nbsp;caused the Black Death [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-and-tech"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9607"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9607\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9608,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9607\/revisions\/9608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}