The Plague: Our Past & Future w/Tim Mason

This is a guest article by Tim Mason. Tim is a Microbiologist, working in a discipline which includes the study of Bacteria, Viruses, Vaccines and Antibiotics. If you would like to hear more. Book your tickets to his next talk with this link.

The Plague: 2000BC to 2000AD

Creationists should not attend! Neither the disease, The Plague nor the bug which causes it have been with us for so very long. Going back just 5,000 years takes us to a time when Yersinia pestis, the causal agent of that dreaded disease just didn’t exist. Archaeologists, digging deep into the skulls of Bronze Age skeletons, have shown us, with their DNA analyses, that it was only at about that time that this new mass murderer of mankind emerged. Over the coming centuries, periodically emerging to cause global epidemics called Pandemics, it would hone its homicidal skills to bring us the killer that brought us the Black Death. Over the course of several centuries that pandemic raged across the land killing about half the world’s population.

From then onward it has never completely gone away, returning in the middle of the nineteenth century to kill many millions more. But where is it today? Would that we knew! Epidemics in Madagascar continue to occur, the most distressing of which was totally untreatable even with the impressive array of antibiotics that we have today.

A disease for which no vaccine is available and which cannot be treated with antibiotics, lends itself perfectly for use in germ warfare. Used perhaps for the first time by Tartar warriors in mediaeval times and later perhaps by the British in North America. The worst was yet to come, as Japanese invaders in the 1930s established germ warfare research laboratories in China. Here hundreds of thousands were killed in the search for ever more destructive strains of the organism, strains which were then put into bombs which would cause the deaths of many, many more than that.