Wendy Orent "Plague" 2004

But the concept of dead-end host is meaningless when we think of the Black Death, where the disease, either borne from person to person byhuman fleas,or transmitted directly by coughing,killed a third of Europe. (Wendy Orent "Plague" 2004 p.3)

Long periods of quiescence, in which the plague germ hides in the soil or in the reservoirs of all-but-resistant animals, are interrupted by violent .....

But what about unnatural plague? We now know that the disease became the Soviet military machine's chief bacteriological weapon: it is virulent, transmissible, stable, and able to accept foreign genetic information. In the years before the downfall of the Soviet Union, those scientists grew weaponized strains of plague by the ton. Indeed, if plague is ever going to strike again in a massive pandemic, it will probably be a result of deliberate human action, thanks to some of the devastating innovastions developped in the Soviet Union and available to many former Soviet scientists. (Wendy Orent "Plague" 2004 p.5)

I try to take a picture, but a car drives past and they ask me to wait until it's out of sight. Domaradskij says that you never see anyone in military dress, within or outside the building, but that he's been told that presently the building is guarded by agents of both the CIA and FSB, the Russian Federal Security Service. (Wendy Orent "Plague" 2004 p.15)

Anti-Plague Institute at Rostov was shifting its emphasis from basic research to biological defense, an area of research the ...

Eventually, Domaradskij was pulled out of Rostov, which remained on the fringes of bioweapons research, into Moscow, the center. By the early 1970s, when Domaradskij began to drift into the closed world of secret science, that world was rapidly changing. In 1969, President Richard M. Nixon unilaterally shut down the U.S. biological weapons program. Three years later the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention was signed by the United States and the Soviet Union as well as seventy-seven other countries. The United States indeed abandoned its program, not without the opposition of the CIA and the weapons scientists themselves. But the Soviet Union used the accord as a shield behind which they built a massive program, employing at its height perhaps thirty thousand people in dozens of secret laboratories, an empire of death that spanned the country.

Domaradskij had become well known to the powers-that-be. He was appointed by Yuri Andropov, general secretary of the Communist Party, and Leonid Brezhnev, soviet president, as deputy chairman of the super-secret Interagency Science and Technology council on Molecular Biology and Genetics. Zhdanov, the famous smallpox eradicator, was made chair. Domaradskij and Zhdanov were tasked with bringing the science of biological weapons into the modern age – “to catch up and leave behind” any potential enemies. This involved the swift assimilation of the genetics discoveries in the West; to that end, Zhdanov and other top scientists (although not Domaradskij) were allowed to travel to the West and to mingle with Western scientists, in order to bring back as much scientific knowledge as possible. Western scientists apparently never suspected Zhdanov’s secret identity as a bioweaponeer. William Foege, the Lasker Prize-winning scientist who invented the ring vaccination strategy that eventually eliminated smallpox from nature, remembers Zhdanov as “a grandfatherly figure who had the goo of the world at heart.” (Wendy Orent "Plague" 2004 p.20-1)

A veterinarian contracted pneumonic plague from a sick cat brought in to her office The veterinarian, who survived, was nursing one baby and caring for a second small child: her children must have been exposed to the disease, but she did not pass it on to them. (Wendy Orent "Plague" 2004 p.34)

Pseudotuberculosis is a relatively mild disorder: people who have it have sharp pains in the stomach and are sometimes operated on for appendicitis. But it's self-limiting; ...

There is an ingenious Darwinian logic at work, from the point of view of the germ. Rat fleas don't leave their host until the rat dies. Fleas only drink warm ... (Wendy Orent "Plague" 2004 p.42)

Then it divided and moved in one direction towards Alexandria and the rest of Aegypt, and in the other direction it came to Palestine on the borders of Aegypt; and from there it spread over the whole world, always moving forward and travelling at times favourable to it.

For it seemed to move by fixed arrangement, and to tarry for a specified time in each country, casting its blight slightingly upon none, but spreading in either direction right out to the ends of the world, as if fearing lest some corner of the earth might escape it. ...... And this disease always took its start from the coast, and from there went up to the interior.

That the disease “took its start from the coast” suggests that the plague followed trade routes. We know from archaeological research that the presence of black rats in the Mediterranean littoral dates at least from the Neolithic; we also know that black rats are not by nature nomadic. They either stay within a few hundred yards of where they were born, or they inhabit ships, debarking at each port; they can use any conveyance, including saddle bags on camels or a wheeled cart filled with grain, but they don’t, by themselves, journey cross-country. The black rat “has never been found further than two hundred meters from a building and lives mostly in granaries and on ships, where it is almost invariably found. It never moves from one village to another or from one port to another, except when passively transported.

Procopius describes the disease in exacting detail, as Thucydides, his model, had done for the Athenian plague: “I shall proceed to tell where this disease originated and the manner in which it destroyed men.” Thucydides he wasn’t, though; he exhibits a modest credulity more typical of his religiously excitable era than the dry rationality of his Athenian forebear:

Apparitions of supernatural beings in human guise of every description were seen by many persons, and those who encountered them thought that they were struck by the man they had met in this or that part of the body, as it happened, and immediately upon seeing this apparition they were seized also by the disease.

Others died after seeing visions in dreams of similar apparitions, or heard voices foretelling that they were written down in the number of the doomed. But the majority, Procopius concedes, were struck by the plague without any advance warning beyond a slight fever.

And the body shewed no change from its previous colour, nor was it hot as might be expected when attacked by a fever, nor indeed did any inflammation set in, but the fever was of such a languid sort from its commencement and up till evening that neither to the sick themselves nor to a physician who touched them would it afford any suspicion of danger.

.....

But on the same day in some cases, in others on the following day, and in the rest not many days later, a bubonic swelling developed; and this took place not only in the particular part of the body which is called "boubon,"[16] that is, below the abdomen, but also inside the armpit, and in some cases also beside the ears, and at different points on the thighs. (Wendy Orent "Plague" 2004 p.76-7)

Apparitions of supernatural beings in human guise of every description were seen by many persons, and those who encountered them thought that they were struck by the man they had met in this or that part of the body, as it happened, and immediately upon seeing this apparition they were seized also by the disease. Now at first those who met these creatures tried to turn them aside by uttering the holiest of names and exorcising them in other ways as well as each one could, but they accomplished absolutely nothing, for even in the sanctuaries where the most of them fled for refuge they were dying constantly. But later on they were unwilling even to give heed to their friends when they called to them, and they shut themselves up in their rooms and pretended that they did not hear, although their doors were being beaten down, fearing, obviously, that he who was calling was one of those demons. But in the case of some the pestilence did not come on in this way, but they saw a vision in a dream and seemed to suffer the very same thing at the hands of the creature who stood over them, or else to hear a voice foretelling to them that they were written down in the number of those who were to die. But with the majority it came about that they were seized by the disease without becoming aware of what was coming either through a waking vision or a dream. Procopius: The Plague, 542 History of the Wars, II.xxii-xxxiii:

And the ways in which it was passed on were various and unaccountable. ...... For some were destroyed merely by being and living together, others too merely by touching, others again when inside their bedchamber, and others in the public square. And some who have fled from the diseased cities have remained unaffected, while passing on the disease to those who were not sick. Others have not caught it at all, even though they associated with many who were sick, and touched many not only who were sick, but even after their death. ...

Is Evagrius, in the first several lines, describing contagion? It is difficult to say; pneumonic plague doesn't appear to be part of the picture, but the account of people catching the ....

A devout Christian who believed that the disease was the sign of God's wrath at sinners, Evagrius could not understand why he had lost so many family members, while "this never happened to pagans with many children." He went to see St. Symeon the Younger, a famous holy man, who had been living on a pillar since childhood (he got his second set of teeth on the column, Evagrius tells us). At the time, St. Symeon lived on top of the Miraculous Mountain in Syria: a whole monastic colony and a great church were eventually built around his pillar, and the ruins can be seen to this day. The holy man, filthy, bearded, and wild-eyed, stared down from his sixty-eight-foot pillar at Evagrius and divined his thoughts: his grief at the loss of his children, his anger at God for sparing the Pagans. St. Symeon told Evagrius that such thoughts were displeasing to God, and that he must put them away. Evagrius rushed up the holy mountain to beg the saint for forgiveness.

John of Ephesus, whose writings survive only in fragments, never doubted the plague was God's work: The blessed prophet Jeremiah ... would cry and lament not over the destruction of one single city ... but over many cities which Wrath had, as it were turned into wine presses --[it treaded] and squeezed inside them all the inhabitants without mercy, as if they were ripe grapes; over the whole earth, because the (divine) decree was issued ...

John says of future generations, “Will they learn through the punishment of us, the miserable ones,and will they be saved from the Wrath of the present and from the punishment of the future?"

The dreams and waking visions of Procopius have become, in John's text, nightmare specters, which haunt the seas in boats of copper, pushed by headless people with copper poles. (Wendy Orent "Plague" 2004 p.81-3)

Gregory is also the source of a curious story about an outbreak in Rome, which became part of the religious mythology sprung up around the plague. In 589, Gregory's deacon Agiulf was in Rome, and witnessed the River Tiber overflowing its ...

... But he became known as the first great pope of the early Middle Ages, and was to be known as Gregory the Great. Immediately after his ascension, he called for masses and penitential processions to avert the plague: he told the people of Rome that “our present trial must pave the way for our conversion” and promised that “When He sees the way we ourselves condemn our own sins, the stern Judge may acquit us of this sentence of damnation which he has proposed for us.”

The stern Judge may have been mollified by Pope Gregory's processions: the plague ceased, and the pope went down in church history.

What connection there may have been between the plague outbreak and the destruction of the wheat in the granaries, with their undoubtedly vast population of drowned or hungry rats, Gregory of Tours does not say. (Wendy Orent "Plague" 2004 p.86-7)

The Justinian Plague did not reach as far as the Black Death would reach, and must have killed far fewer people. ... the Middle East.47

As far as the rise of Islam, how great a role did the relative weakness of the Byzantine Empire, after enduring many waves of plague, play in the ease with which that militant religion was able to sweep across North Africa and much of the Middle East? "Would it be unreasonable to suppose that the plague had something to do with the rather unexpected success of Arab revolts in the East and in North Africa?" ask Le Goff and Biraben.

Historian Timothy Bratton points out that we can't say that "the plague, and only the plague, was responsible for all the ills of the post-Justinian Empire." Much of the blame for these ills lies with the emperor himself. .......

......

Western Europe crept out of the empire’s shadow into the Middle Ages and its own history, leaving the classical world behind. It formed a new, syncretistic civilization. As tribe after tribe from the north settled down among the shards of old Roman Gaul. As Le Goff and Biraben put it:

As for the West, there is one tempting hypothesis. It is a fact that the British Isles, northern Gaul, and Germania were, for the most part, spared by the plague. Could not this have been one of the reasons for the shift of power in Europe from the south to the north, from the Mediterranean to the North Sea? If we dared pursue this idea further -- too far, no doubt -- we might advance the hypothesis that the Justinian plague, having contributed to an explanation for Mohammed, can also explain Chalemagne.

(Wendy Orent "Plague" 2004 p.94-5)

Dols cited ..... The prophet Muhammad had taught that illnesses, particularly plagues, were a gift from God, and belief in contagion, therefore, became heresy in the Muslim world. Ibn al-Khatib's insistance on the obvious fact of the plague's contagion flouted religious authority, and angered the Muslim leadership of his time. Nonetheless, Ibn al-Khatib recognized that plague spreads most when the lungs are infected.21 In due course, the heretical Ibn al-Khatib paid for his conviction with his life.

.....

.... But Gabriele De’ Mussi, a lawyer of Piancenza, wrote a famous account of the fate of Mongols and Genoese alike:

O God! See how the heathen Tartar races, pouring together from all sides, suddenly invested the city of Caffa and besieged the trapped Christians there for almost three years. There, hemmed in by an immense army, they could hardly draw breath, although food could be shipped in, which offered them some hope. But behold, the whole army was affected by a disease which overran the Tartars and killed thousands upon thousands every day. It was as though arrows were raining down from heaven to strike and crush the Tartars’ arrogance. All medical advice and attention was useless; the Tartars died as soon as the signs of disease appeared on their bodies; swellings in the armpit or groin caused by coagulating humours, followed by a putrid fever.

The dying Tartars, stunned and stupefied by the immensity of the disaster brought about by the disease, and realizing that they had no hope of escape, lost interest in the siege. But they ordered corpses to be placed in catapults and lobbed into the city in the hope that the intolerable stench would kill everyone inside. What seemed like mountains of dead were thrown into the city, and the Christians could not hide or flee or escape from them, although they dumped as many of the bodies as they could in the sea. And soon the rotting corpses tainted the air and poisoned the water supply, and the stench was so overwhelming that hardly one in several thousand was in a position to flee the remains of the Tartar army. Moreover one infected man could carry the poison to others, and infect people and places with the disease by look alone. No one knew, or could discover, a means of defense. (Wendy Orent "Plague" 2004 p.106-9)

The Plague in Oregon

Biological Warfare at the 1346 Siege of Caffa The Narrative of Gabriele De’ Mussi

Gabriele De’ Mussi quoted in Readings in Medieval History, Fifth Edition edited by Patrick J. Geary

The Black Death could spread as fast as people could travel, because it was borne by human beings.

...

..... both cities and countryside, spreading across to Florence and down into Rome.

...

That the plague in Florence was devastating goes without saying; that it was contagious as well there can be no doubt:

Let me say ... that thirteen hundred and forty-eight years had already passed after the fruitful Incarnation of the Son of God when into the distinguished city of Florence, more noble than any other Italian city, there came a deadly pestilence. Either because of the influence of heavenly bodies or because of God’s just wrath as a punishment to mortals for our wicked deeds, the pestilence, originating some years earlier in the East, killed an infinite number of people as it spread relentlessly from one place to another until finally it had stretched its miserable length all over the West. And against this pestilence no human wisdom or foresight was of any avail; quantities of filth were removed from the city by officials charged with the task; the entry of any sick person into the city was prohibited; and many directives were issued concerning the maintenance of good health. Nor were the humble supplications rendered not once but many times by the pious to God, through public processions or by other means, in any way efficacious; for almost at the beginning of springtime of the year in question the plague began to show its sorrowful effects in an extraordinary manner. It did not assume the form it had in the East, where bleeding from the nose was a manifest sign of inevitable death, but rather it showed its first signs in men and women alike by means of swellings either in the groin or under the armpits, some of which grew to the size of an ordinary apple and others to the size of an egg (more or less), and the people called them “gavoccioli” (“bubboni” in modern Italian and “buboes” in modern English—hence the modern term, “bubonic plague”). And from the two parts of the body already mentioned, in very little time, the said deadly gavoccioli began to spread indiscriminately over every part of the body; then, after this, the symptoms of the illness changed to black or livid (bluish-gray) spots appearing on the arms and thighs, and on every part of the body—sometimes there were large ones and other times a number of little ones scattered all around. And just as the gavoccioli were originally, and still are, a very definite indication of impending death, in like manner these spots came to mean the same thing for whoever contracted them. Neither a doctor’s advice nor the strength of medicine could do anything to cure this illness; on the contrary, either the nature of the illness was such that it afforded no cure, or else the doctors were so ignorant that they did not recognize its cause and, as a result, could not prescribe the proper remedy (in fact, the number of doctors, other than the well-trained, was increased by a large number of men and women who had never had any medical training); at any rate, few of the sick were ever cured, and almost all died after the third day of the appearance of the previously described symptoms (some sooner, others later), and most of them died without fever or any other side effects. ... .. (Wendy Orent "Plague" 2004 p.118-9)

An Account of the Black Death from The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio translation may be different and needs to be checked.

The new inhabitants, descendants of northern land-grabbers and Crusaders, turned upon the Jews, ... book, The Black Death.69

Meanwhile, the plague spread throughout France, to the north and east of Provence. It reached Lyons near the Swiss border sometime in 1348, as twenty-six wills attributing the cause of death to ...

In the year of grace 1348, about the feast of St. James the great mortality entered Normandy. And it came into Gascony, and Poitou, and Brittany, and passed into Picardy. And it was so horrible that in the towns it attacked more than two-thirds of the population died. And a father did not dare to go and visit his son, nor a brother his sister, and people could not be found to nurse one another, because, when the person breathed the breath of another he could not escape. (Excerpt also cited in The Great Pestilence (a. D. 1348-1349) Now Commonly Known as the Black Death By Francis Aidan Gasquet at Gutenburg)

Gilles Li Muisis, the abbot of .....

I have tried ..... to let future generations believe that in Tournay there was a marvellous mortality. I heard from many about Christmas time who professed to know it as a fact that more than 25,000 persons had died in Tournay, and it was strange [p053] that the mortality was especially great among the chief people and the rich. Of those who used wine and kept away from the tainted air and visiting the sick few or none died. But those visiting and frequenting the houses of the sick either became grievously ill or died. Deaths were more numerous about the market places and in poor narrow streets than in broader and more spacious areas. And whenever one or two people died in any house, at once, or at least in a short space of time, the rest of the household were carried off. So much so, that very often in one home ten or more ended their lives together, and in many houses the dogs and even cats died. Hence no one, whether rich, in moderate circumstances, or poor, was secure, but everyone from day to day waited on the will of the Lord. And certainly great was the number of curates and chaplains hearing confessions and administering the Sacraments, and even of parish clerks visiting the sick with them, who died." (The Great Pestilence at Gutenburg) It is hard to imagine a clearer description of the workings of an infectious disease transmitted directly from person to person than this.

.....

.... the horror induced by the pestilence gave rise to a strange and terrible new brotherhood -- the Flagellants, the Brethren of the Cross. Many devout Christians looked on the plague as God's just punishment for their sins; .... (Wendy Orent "Plague" 2004 p.128-31)

One of the enduring mysteries of the mysterious affliction is why, after flaming across Europe over and over again since the fourteenth century, with a change in its mode of transmission, but with no diminishment of its power, did plague disappear? Plague had been more or less endemic in England for centuries: in between major epidemics, an individual case here, a small outbreak there, were regular events hardly noticed. But after Marseilles, the disease simply vanished, retreating to the Levant, the Middle East, Turkey, and Russia, where it broke out in two terrible waves in the mid-eighteenth century. Then it receded from those redouts, too, back into its ancient reservoirs in Central Asia, northern Central Africa, China.

Many theories have been advanced, and none proven. Some scholars have suggested that silent infection with one of the two related Yersina species, Yersina pseudotuberculosis and/or Yersina enterocolitica, helped inoculate the European rat population against pestis. an article by French scholar J.M. Alonso puts it this way:

Experimental infection by Y. enterocolitica, inducing a transitory and spontaneously cured infection in the immunocompetent host, promotes efficient immunity against plague. Thus, it seem likely that the emergence of some variants of Yersinia, less virulent than Y. pestis, but able to induce a long-lasting protective immunity against plague, have contributed to its eradication by a silent enzootic infection among the wild reservoirs of rodents.

This is intriguing, if unprovable. But plague in Europe has always been a disease of commensal (domestic), not of wild, rodents. Elsewhere in Eurasia active plague foci continue to exist – and pseudotuberculosis has done nothing, after several centuries, to eliminate them. In the one region, therefore, where we might actually expect to see evidence of such replacement of one Yersinia infection by another, there is no such evidence at all. (Wendy Orent "Plague" 2004 p.166-7)

Yersin believed that insects could carry plague; he ground up the legs and heads of dead flies he had found in his laboratory and injected the results into guinea pigs, which later died of plague.

...... Pricking the feet of rats with a plague-contaminated needle infected them easily, while rubbing plague material on the surface of an intact rat foot produced nothing. Simond pointed out that no one had ever shown that plague patients had sores on their feet.

But the ability of tiny pinpricks to cause infection in rats made Simond wonder: could a sucking insect contaminated with plague produce the same effect? He found that a small percentage of plague patients had a tiny ulcer or blister, called a phlyctenule, usually on the lower leg, ......

Simond reasoned from the appearance reasoned from the appearance of these blisters that they must have been caused by the introduction of plague into the body by an insect bite. ..... Though he never understood the mechanism of blockage, he nevertheless is responsible for the crucial discovery that fleas form the bridge between rats and men. His most critical experiment showed that healthy rats could not contract plague from sick ones in the absence of fleas.

But no one believed him. The British Indian Plague Research Commission, as British plague researchers & author L. Fabian Hirst puts it, "considered Simond's experimental evidence so weak 'as to be hardly deserving of consideration.' ... In Hong Kong, Hunter and Simpson failed to infect rats with infected rat fleas and concluded that 'plague infected fleas are of no practical importance in regard to the spread of plague.'" It was many years before Simond's discovery received its proper and general acknowledgement.

Meanwhile, the Third Pandemic raged. From Hong Kong, ships spread infection all over the world: to the United States and much of Latin America, to Australia, to India, to South Africa. .... (Wendy Orent "Plague" 2004 p.182-5)

After the last pneumonic epidemic in 1921, plague came back to north Manchuria, this time not as a natural outbreak, but as an agent of human design. The plague germ, among other agents, was used by the Japanese as a weapon of mass extermination. Thousands of Chinese, American, and Russian victims, whom the Japanese experimenters called “logs,” were subject to various bacteriological experiments. Some were injected with plague, anthrax, and other disease germs, and dissected while still alive and conscious. Some were prisoners of war; many were taken off the street of Harbin. The once cosmopolitan, thriving town had been the home of White Russians, Jews, Koreans, Mongols, and Europeans from many countries, all wood now for Ishii’s mill. Dragged off the streets and accused of various trumped-up charges, Ishii's logs were sometimes subjected to kangaroo trials and sometimes simply sent straightaway to Ping-fan's death factories.

Thousands of other people, mostly Chinese, were apparently killed in large plague epidemics started by various Japanese field trials, some of which involved dropping porcelain bombs filled with plague-infected fleas. Epidemic wave after epidemic wave swept over the area; some plague outbreaks reached further into China. According to one scholar:

In 1940, a series of epidemics struck Nongan county, 50 kilometers northwest of Chanchuan [the site of Unit 100, another Japanese biological weapons experimental unit]. The origin of the epidemic is still uncertain. There is some evidence that the pestilence may have come to Nongan by accident. Several scholars believe that waste from the Changchuan facility somehow seeped into the underground water table, and spread as far north as Nongan. Others are convinced that rats escaped from the Unit 100 laboratories, and brought plague with them to the infected region. Still others are certain that the Nongan county plague epidemic was nothing more than a BW field test undertaken by Unit 100.

Plague cannot be spread in water; perhaps the disease was spread by escaped plague-infected rats, though the thought of lab rats escaping and marching across the countryside to a city fifty miles distant seems rather doubtful. We know the Japanese conducted plague field trials -- so a deliberate bioweapons attack on the region seems the most reasonable explanation.

Another Japanese biological weapons base was established in the ancient Chinese city of Nanking in 1939, two years after the Japanese conquered that city. For two months beginning in December 1937, Japanese soldiers had run wild, slaughtering, looting, and raping: the infamous Rape of Nanking. Some twenty thousand women were raped, and 200,000 men cut down in the streets.

.....

The actual number of people who died in Ishii's bioweapons attacks and experiments will never be known, but the toll of the dead may have reached six figures. The Soviets made use of the knowledge garnered by Japanese scientists in their atrocious activities, but they weren't the only ones. America intervened in the process of postwar justice for the sake of information on biological weapons the Japanese were willing to share, and helped the worst of the Japanese war criminals escape punishment.

...... (Wendy Orent "Plague" 2004 p.212-7)

Hundreds of scientists studied plague in several of the institute's departments. The microbe was encoded as Agent No. 1 on the secret list of bacteria used to make biological weapons.

According to Popov, though, Biopreparat research in the institute was still inadequate and had to be boosted. Popov was placed in charge of Domaradskij's laboratory, from which the later had been summarily removed. At Vector, Popov had worked under Lev Sandakhchiev, who Popov claims is responsible for, among other designs, a plan to create totally artificial viruses. Popov synthesized the DNA to produce peptides -- small protein chains that form various immune chemicals -- and, with Vector virologists, inserted them into mousepox virus and vaccinia virus, stand-ins for smallpox. Popov's team, consisting of more than fifty experienced biochemists, had foreight years hand-synthesized various strips of ... (Wendy Orent "Plague" 2004 p.216-7)

According to Popov, Volkovoi's team successfully tried several approaches to introduce antibiotic resistance into plague, including the use of natural plague plasmids, integrating the resistance genes right into an existing plasmid.17 But, ...

.... To figure this out, you have to factor in the strain, the type of preparation, the number of viable cells in a certain quantity of the preparation, and so forth. With the addition of diphtheria toxin, a deadly poison, Volkovoi and his coworker hoped to reduce the number of cells required to produce a fatal infection.

Instead of adding an additional plasmid containing the genes coding for diphtheria toxin, the two Russian researchers integrated the novel genetic information directly into one of the three natural plasmids. Integrating the code for diphtheria toxin directly into a natural plasmid, Popov says, guarantees that it will be stable. On a natural plasmid, furthermore, it is much more suitable for expression and manipulation than it would be on the plague germ chromosome itself.

They hoped for greater virulance; what they got was surprising, and far more ominus. When they tested their plague=diphtheria chimera on monkeys, they found that it overcame immunity to live plague vaccine. In other words, the new plague chimera was, at least to some extent, not only lethal at lower doses than normal weaponized plague, but also vaccine resistant.

A hyper-lethal, Vaccine-resistant, antibiotic-resistant plague weapon would be the most powerful biological weapon of all -- a veritable Andromeda Strain, a Black Death for the twenty-first century. There is no reason to think such a weapon has ever been made. But the technology may now exist to produce it.

In the United States, the main biological weapons threats are considered to be smallpox and anthrax. But to the Russians, plague is the most bacterial threat agent. As anthrax and plague genomics expert Paul Keim of Northern Arizona University puts it, the Russian and U.S. biodefense programs are like mirror images of each other: we fear antrax, sicne it is both lethal and extremely durable in the environment, and they fear plague, for its virulence and transmissibility. .... (Wendy Orent "Plague" 2004 p.220-1)

Plague was never central to the former U.S. bioweapons effort, for one simple reason: despite sophisticated research on plague aerosol infectivity, among other topics, carried out at the old bioweapons laboratories at Fort Detrick before the 1969 shutdown, American scientists were never able to grow the germ in bulk. ... There is a trick to growing plague in bulk, which the Soviets(and even, apparently, Ishii's men) well understood. But our scientists did not know the trick. When Domaradskij heard of this, he seemed astounded. Then he laughed and said, "Let them come here, we'll teach them!"

.......

.... They also know what can be added to plague to enhance its virulence, or give it antibiotic resistance.

Putting all of this together gives us a frightening picture quite unlike that of plague as it is understood in America. The potential for a lethal weapon, another Black Death, is still there, in the stocks and storehouses of the former Soviet Union. Supposedly the actual weaponized stocks were destroyed, though no one in the West has seen evidence of that destruction. The Soviet bioweapons program was ordered shutdown by President Yeltsin in 1992, and no one expects that weaponized stocks of plague could still remain viable. But the seed strains remain, and the knowledge remains. Yeltsin could order an end to plague and anthrax and smallpox production, but he could not erase the requisite knowledge from his scientists minds and hearts.

Obolensk is crumbling; as I write this in August 2003, General Nikolai Urakov, Domaradskij's former nemesis, has recently been removed from his post because of his mismanagement of the former All-Union Institute of Applied Microbiology. There are efforts now underway to remove all dangerous pathogens from the institute and to convert the entire complex, with the help of U.S. funds, to the production of drugs and medicines. But four other former bioweapons laboratories, which continue to be operated by the Russian Ministry of Defense, are still completely closed to the West. They are black holes; we have no idea, and Russians like Domaradskij have no idea, what goes on in those laboratories. If bioweapons work does not continue, why does the Russian Ministry of Defense continue to keep American delegations out, and to prohibit contact between Ministry of Defense and American scientists? Many American scientists are still concerned about what goes on at Kirov, at Pokrov, at Sergiyev Posad, where smallpox virus was once grown by the ton, and at Ekaterinburg (formerly Sverdlovsk), the site of a 1979 bioweapons accident that left sixty-eight people dead of inhalational anthrax.

The strains exist, the knowledge exists. We are not in any apparent danger of a bioweapons attack from Russia itself. But many former Soviet scientists are unemployed, and some of them may be hungry. Quite a few of the best specialists have made their way to the West; but there are others.

Popov speaks with considerable bitterness about the world he left behind in 1992, when he fled to Britain: "It was so miserable to be a scientist in Russia; no money no status." Urakov's sharp dealings kept his staff on the edge of starvation; he forced them to buy sugar from the enterprise he controlled at exorbitant prices. The scientists were sometimes reduced to desperate measures just to eat.

One winter night wolves from the deep woods that surround Obolensk broke into their hutches where the scientists kept their experimental rabbits, which were not infected, but which had been immunized against a whole range of bacterial deseases. In the morning Popov woke to see the dead rabbits lying in frozen pools of blood on the snow. He thought to himself, "The meat is undamaged, and there's enough food for six months." He issued a permit for the carcasses to be put in garbage bags and transported outside the facility. But at night in his garage, he skinned them and put them in his freezer. Those rabbits fed his family a whole winter long, while Popov went to England to look for work.

Is it any wonder that some Russian scientists have peddled their knowledge to the highest bidder? Some have gone to Iran to share their expertise; others to other countries, including Iraq. One scientist, N. Kislichkin, opened his own company, Bioeffect, at Obolensk, with offices in Vienna and Moscow. He tried to hawk Domaradskij's own genetically enhanced, antibiotic-resistant tularemia strain, though it is unclear whether there were any takers. He produced a commercial flyer, which in Domaradskij's translation, offers "to create novel microorganisms of a vaccine group for infections on the basis of a customer's order. Bioeffect was ready to cooperate in research activities within investigations of virulence factor of different infections." Kislichkin characterizes his business as follows: Yes, I really have my own private biological firm. But I am working absolutely legal and creating genetic changed microorganisms only vaccine groups .... (Wendy Orent "Plague" 2004 p.224-9)

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Both anthrax and bubonic plague begin with similar flu-like symptoms, and the two diseases could have been conflated by contemporary doctors. And it is not hard to perceive how this anthrax-based plague—if Twigg's theory is correct—could ...

That cattle were ravaged by these epidemics is certain. The question remains whether a natural anthrax mutant could be communicated to humans. The answer appears to be in the affirmative. ... (Norman Cantor "In The Wake Of The Plague" 2001 p.14-5)

Finally in the 1440s the English Parliament for this Holocaust and the French -- according to doubtful national legend rallied by a visionary peasant girl, Joan of Arc -- defeated the marauding English and drove most of them out. The English kept only one French city, the port of Calais, until the mid–sixteenth century, and they never again made aggressive war on the European continent, preferring to create instead an empire overseas. .... (Norman Cantor "In The Wake Of The Plague" 2001 p.36)

Did contemporaries think of Edward III as an evil scourge? Plenty of French peasants did, but among the articulate and literate classes, aside from a handful of radical friars, he was not even considered a tyrant. That term, derived from Roman writers was reserved for an absolute monarch who ruled without consent of the people. By that definition Edward III was no tyrant. (Cantor seems to accept consent from upper classes that only accounted for a small minority of the people as consent from the people, which is common among a portion of educated people that may only interact with other upper class educated people; however, this attitude was even more common among the Romans, he cited for providing this definition.)

.....

That today we may look back on the English king of the fourteenth century as a kind of destructive and merciless force, while to nearly all articulate and literate contemporaries he was a constitutional king and very model of chivalry and ...

.... They were to be obeyed and eulogized, not criticized or condemned. It was natural for Edward III to press his marginal claims to the French throne, inevitable that ...

But the coming marriage of Princess Joan and Prince Pedro loomed as a great event in every respect, political, religious, and diplomatic. Joan rested at the royal castle ...

Religious authorities, whether priests or rabbis, are always in the front rank of celebrants of the marriage of the scions of rich families. It is and was an appearance they relish making ...

Women in the Middle Ages had an even shorter life expectancy than men as long as they continued to produce children. Their frequent pregnancies and childbirths commonly led to death by thirty from some obstetrical or gynecological complication. (Norman Cantor "In The Wake Of The Plague" 2001 p.37-41)

Thereby the royal justices automatically granted free status to any peasant who was a plaintiff or defendant in a lawsuit in the county court. This happened on a large scale in the century after 1180. It also by itself dribbled more money into the Plantagenet treasury, because litigants ... (Norman Cantor "In The Wake Of The Plague" 2001 p.72-3)

Most of this land had been granted to the church officials and corporations by lay nobility and gentry in the period between 1000 and 1200 when land was still cheap in England. .....

The courts informally decided that no lord should alienate to the church more than 10 percent of his entailed estates. But this was more than enough to enrich ecclesiastics.

With the ...

Bishops had for a thousand years been men of business, public officials, usually of noble family, experienced in managing income and skillful at getting ever more of it. How else were the great Gothic-style cathedrals of the ... (Norman Cantor "In The Wake Of The Plague" 2001 p.76-7)

His treatise on astrophysics was not published in print until 1618, and its circulation in manuscript in the Middle Ages was a very small one. Therefore, his innovative ...

Bradwardine did not develop the implications of his theory, probably because they would have struck at the center of medieval religion and moral belief. He was content to leave ...

..... Becoming the center of a highly visible theological and moral controversy would have restricted his career possibilities.

Bradwardine was not ...

Heavyweight intellectuals rarely become archbishop of Canterbury in the Middle Ages. That does not mean the Canterbury archbishops were not well educated and highly literate

Occam was by 1348 an old man, in his mid-sixties, and he had not been in England since the second decade of the fourteenth century. Occam's disrespect for the absolute authority of the pope—or even of a general council of the ...

Bradwardine was not attuned to the Occamist-Marsilian frontal assault on the papacy. Whatever his opinion of what was going on in Avignon, he kept it to himself ... (Norman Cantor "In The Wake Of The Plague" 2001 p.110-3)

Since scientists had no microscope until around 1600 and no powerful one until around 1870, they could not see the disease-carrying bacilli. Therefore, in spite of some good work by Bradwardine and the Oxford school in the realm of theoretical physics (where it was relatively easy to catch Aristotle in error), the powerful and learned Oxford intellects had nothing to put forward to explain the Black Death.

Physicians attributed the plague to physiological imbalance, and when that story paled in the fact of a raging pandemic, other explanations were trotted out. A commission of Parisian scholars assembled by the king somberly announced that the problem was astrological, something about Saturn in the house of Jupiter.

Of course moralists pronounced the plague to be divine retribution for sin, and while the sermonizers worked overtime to disseminate this conventional explanation, it was not convincing when the good and bad perished in equal numbers in the Black Death. Serpents and snakes were thought to be carriers of the plague, or it was just attributed to Jewish malevolence. (Norman Cantor "In The Wake Of The Plague" 2001 p.119)

History of the Microscope

Christians might well suspect that among the hermeneutic secrets of the cabala were arcane recipes for magic, and poisons, and spells, that the cabala constituted a kind of Black Magic. .....

Would there have been less tendency for Christians to make scapegoats out of the Jews, charge them with spreading the plague by poisoning wells, and unleash horrible pogroms on them?

... That Jews were victims is clear, that the leadership of their intellectual elite might have made things worse has been underinvestigated.

The Jews in these places escaped by enclosing themselves within the walls of their quarters. All told, the Jews of Spain escaped lightly by comparison with those of northern Europe. ... (Norman Cantor "In The Wake Of The Plague" 2001 p.152-3)

and their lives, but there is now widespread ...

Diseases coming to earth from outer space can be viewed as another Jungian archetype, in modern times worked into redundancy by science fiction writers. But this banality does not rule out a real scientific basis for the idea of diseases from outer space.

The theory that the Black Death originated in outer space dates back to a book published in 1979, Diseases From Outer Space, by Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinge. Since then the two authors have published a series of books, one as recently as 1993 (Our Place in the Cosmos), in which they have responded to new developments in research and, to some extent, to criticism of their thesis. Hoyle is a renowned Cambridge astrophysicist and Wickramasinge is Professor of Applied Mathematics and Astronomy in the School of Mathematics in the University of Wales, Cardiff. (Norman Cantor "In The Wake Of The Plague" 2001 p.178-9)

"To argue that stricken rats set out on a safari that took them six months not merely from southern to northern France but even across the Alpine massif, borders on the ridiculous. What remarkable rats they were! To have crossed the sea and to have marched into remote English villages, and yet to have effectively bypassed the cities of Milan, Liege and Nuremberg," where the incidence of plague was very low. (Milan it may be noted, enforced a quarantine that may have saved its citizens from the plague.)

.... But the Hoyle thesis has gained some surprising sympathy in scientific circles. In the 1980s Sir Francis Crick, the molecular biologist and Noble laureate, who was codiscoverer of the structure of DNA, mounted arguments similar to Hoyle's, causing a momentary press sensation. In 1999 Paul Davies, a theoretical physicist ...

They can argue that the vision of the last things, especially in the Book of Revelation, over-determined these imaginative scenarios of earthquakes that liberated huge serpents that swam up rivers and spread disease.

But we can't be sure that these hotblooded medieval explanations are simply derivative of artfully constructed biblical terror. They could have happened, just as the stories about King Arthur, Queen Guinevere, and Lancelot told around Welsh campfires in the early Middle Ages could have happened and then been dispersed to the far margins of literacy by the rationalizing state and church of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. When an obscure administrator at the University of London, John Morris, took this line in The Age of Arthur (1973), the academics laughed at him -- too readily. It is just possible that medieval writers who placed the origins of the Black Death in serpents dispensing plague as they swam up rivers were on to something.

Vertical transmission of disease from outer space in the trails of comets is our era's version of the extreme history of the Black Death. Although expressed in the context of astrophysics and endorsed by a handful of respectable scientists and science writers, the cosmic dust thesis strikes us very much like the medieval fixation on water serpents.

At a certain point, however -- one we have not yet reached -- extreme history begins to impinge on conventional historiography, and common consciousness has to acknowledge that things unique, horrendous, and otherwise inexplicable have in fact occurred. (Norman Cantor "In The Wake Of The Plague" 2001 p.182-3)

For reasons involving water and sewerage and the capacity to encircle urban enclaves with high defensive walls, no city in the thirteenth century had more than 125,000 people. But the heartland areas were also dotted with small towns of 5,000 to 20,000 people and innumerable villages holding 500 to 2,000 souls. In many ... (Norman Cantor "In The Wake Of The Plague" 2001 p.94)

But there was one important difference. Europe of the nineteenth century, at least in the second half, invested heavily in scientific research and laid the basis thereby for first The New Physics of the early decades of the twentieth century and then the biomedical revolution after 1940. ... (Norman Cantor "In The Wake Of The Plague" 2001 p.194-5)

For a short account from a secular point of view and based on all the recent scholarship, see Norman F. Cantor, The Sacred Chain: A History of the Jews (London: Fontanta, ... (Norman Cantor "In The Wake Of The Plague" 2001 p.224-5)

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