The germ that causes the plague began infecting humans thousands of years earlier than scientists had previously thought.

Researchers analyzed teeth from the remains of 101 individuals that were collected from a variety of museums and archaeological excavations. They found DNA of the bacterium that causes plague, called Yersinia pestis, in seven of these people. The earliest sample that had plague DNA was from Bronze Age Siberia, and dated back to 2794 B.C., and the latest specimen with plague, from early Iron Age Armenia, dated back to 951 B.C.

Previously, the oldest direct molecular evidence that this bacterium infected humans was only about 1,500 years old.

"We were able to find genuine Yersinia pestis DNA in our samples 3,000 years earlier than what had previously been shown," said Simon Rasmussen, a lead author of the study and a bioinformatician at the Technical University of Denmark.

The finding suggests that plague might be responsible for mysterious epidemics that helped end the Classical period of ancient Greece and undermined the Imperial Roman army, the researchers said.

The new study also sheds light on how plague bacteria have evolved over time, and on how it and other diseases might evolve in the future, the investigators added.

Plague is a lethal disease so infamous that it has become synonymous with any dangerous, widespread contagion. It was one of the first known biological weapons — for instance, in 1346, Mongols catapulted plague victims into the Crimean city of Caffa, according to a 14th-century Italian memoir. The germ is carried and spread by fleas, as well as person-to-person contact.

Yersinia pestis has been linked with at least two of the most devastating pandemics in recorded history. One, the Great Plague, which lasted from the 14th to 17th centuries, included the notorious epidemic known as the Black Death, which may have killed up to half of Europe's population at the time.

Some potentially disturbing news out of France this week: Researchers studying the lungs of young Parisian asthma patients have found evidence that man-made carbon nanotubes are becoming a common air pollutant.

Carbon nanotubes are deliberately manufactured in several industries — their unique physical properties make them useful in electronics and nanotechnology, especially. But they can also be created accidentally, as a byproduct of catalytic converters in automobile engines.

The study — conducted by researchers in Paris and at Rice University in Houston — found that carbon nanotubes from the asthma patients' lungs are similar to nanotube samples taken from the exhaust pipes of Paris vehicles.

It's apparently not just a local problem, either: The samples are also similar to nanotubes found in Houston, in spider webs in India and even in polar ice cores.

No direct linkage is suggested between the nanotubes and asthma, but previous studies have questioned whether carbon nanotubes might act like asbestos, a known carcinogen.

"The concentrations of nanotubes are so low in these samples that it's hard to believe they would cause asthma, but you never know," says chemist Lon Wilson in press materials provided by Rice University. "What surprised me the most was that carbon nanotubes were the major component of the carbonaceous pollution we found in the samples."

The Australian government is set to pass a law that would withhold child care and other benefits from parents who opt out of vaccinating their children.

Under the "No Jab, No Pay Bill" introduced to Parliament, the "conscientious objector" category would be removed, making parents ineligible for full government benefits for not immunizing their children. Youngsters would only be exempt due to medical reasons.

If the law is passed, families could lose up to 15,000 Australian dollars ($11,000) per child per year in tax and child care benefits starting January 1, 2016, if their children are not inoculated. [1]

There has been a rise in unvaccinated children under age 7 in Australia, due to parental concern over the potential side effects of vaccines, and worse. Over the past decade, the number of children under 7 who aren't vaccinated has increased from 24,000 to 39,000. There are reasons for it, too. Encephalopathy, febrile seizures, anaphylaxis and hardening of the brain are two devastating conditions associated with measles immunization. And there are many reported adverse vaccine effects reported (and many more unreported) to the CDC and FDA - known as VAERS.

No matter; Australian legislators are adamant that moms and dads "jab" their kids, despite their well-founded fears.

"The choice made by some families not to vaccinate their children is not supported by public policy or medical research, nor should such action be supported by taxpayers in the form of family payments," Social Services Minister Scott Morrison told Parliament.

A seed storage vault built into the side of an Arctic mountain to protect global food supplies in case of global cataclysm is being tapped by researchers in the Middle East who say the Syrian war has devastated their crops.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, built in 2008 by the Norwegian government as the world's largest secure seed storage, is intended to protect thousands of varieties of essential food crops against things like nuclear disaster, disease and climate change.

Now, the devastation brought on by the war in Syria, which has raged on for four years and claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, has prompted researchers to request some of the samples they gave to the vault, as their collection of crops in Aleppo was destroyed in the fighting.

Among the samples requested by the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA) crops resistant to drought that could help scientists develop and secure food supplies in the face of climate change in dry areas worldwide.

Protecting the world's biodiversity in this manner is precisely the purpose of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault," said Brian Lainoff, spokesman for the Crop Trust, which runs the underground store, located on a Norwegian island 1,300 km (800 miles) from the North Pole.

Health authorities in Sierra Leone said Tuesday they had quarantined almost 700 people as they battled to contain a new outbreak of Ebola which killed a 16-year-old girl.

The teenager died Sunday in a rural suburb of the city of Makeni, in a northern province that had not recorded a single case of the deadly virus in nearly six months.

"Over 680 people in the village of Robureh are now under a 21-day quarantine," Amadu Thullah, a spokesman for the local Ebola response centre told AFP.

The centre said those locked down included her parents, close relatives and classmates.

"They are classified as high risk although they have not exhibited any signs and symptoms of the disease," added health ministry spokesman Seray Turay.

"The surveillance team of the Ebola response centre have intensified their investigations and is working to nip the issue in the bud."

The girl's death came two weeks after a 67-year-old food trader was killed by the tropical fever in the neighbouring district of Kambia, but the two outbreaks are not linked.

The National Ebola Response Centre (NERC) said 1,524 people were in quarantine across the two districts.

First ever bubonic plague case confirmed in Michigan
A Michigan resident has contracted the rare, life-threatening bubonic plague — the first documented case in Michigan's public health history, state officials confirmed.

The Marquette County adult is recovering after apparently contracting the flea-borne illness during a trip to Colorado. Officials are reassuring the public there is no cause for alarm, despite the disease's connection to the microorganism that caused the Black Death plague in Europe in the 1300s, killing millions and reshaping history.

"It's same organism but, in this case, the infection resides in a lymph node," said Dr. Terry Frankovich, medical director for the Marquette County Health Department.

The bubonic plague, in fact, is notably marked by one or more swollen, tender and painful lymph nodes, usually in the groin, armpit or neck.

With the bubonic plague, people are most often infected by bites from infected fleas or when they have direct contact with the tissues or body fluids from an infected animal. The highest risk is in settings that offer food and shelter for rodents — campsites and cabins, for example, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention.


The Michigander's case did not develop into the more contagious pneumonic form of the plague. Pneumonic plague may be passed between humans, infecting the lungs and causing a rapidly developing pneumonia that can lead to respiratory failure and shock, according to the CDC.

A third form, septicemic, occurs when the plague organism multiplies in the blood, and it can lead to shock, organ failure and — as in the case of a Colorado teen earlier this year — death.

U.S. health officials said on Thursday they were puzzled by a surge in the number of people who have contracted a rare bacterial disease usually found in rabbits that has already killed a Wyoming man and sickened dozens of people in Colorado, South Dakota and Nebraska this year.

The unusually high number of cases of tularemia, sometimes called rabbit fever, have been concentrated in northeastern Wyoming and in neighboring parts of South Dakota and Nebraska and farther south in the Colorado Front Range, where there have been reported die-offs of animals like rabbits and voles that can carry the infectious disease, Wyoming health officials said.

While tularemia, whose symptoms can include fever, sore throat and muscle aches, is often present in the environment, it rarely sickens more than a few people a year in Wyoming, a handful in Colorado and just a few in South Dakota, health officials said.

Scientists said they will reanimate a 30,000-year-old giant virus unearthed in the frozen wastelands of Siberia, and warned climate change may awaken dangerous microscopic pathogens.

Reporting this week in the flagship journal of the US National Academy of Sciences, French researchers announced the discovery of Mollivirus sibericum, the fourth type of prehistoric virus found since 2003 - and the second by this team.

Before waking it up, researchers will have to verify that the bug cannot cause animal or human disease.

To qualify as a "giant", a virus has to be longer than half a micron, a thousandth of a millimetre (0.00002 of an inch).

Mollivirus sibericum - "soft virus from Siberia" - comes in at 0.6 microns, and was found in the permafrost of northeastern Russia.

Climate change is warming the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions at more than twice the global average, which means that permafrost is not so permanent any more.

"A few viral particles that are still infectious may be enough, in the presence of a vulnerable host, to revive potentially pathogenic viruses," one of the lead researchers, Jean-Michel Claverie, told AFP.

The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services has reported the first death from West Nile Virus in the Tarheel State in 2015. The state did not have any previous cases this year.

So far in 2015, 415 cases of West Nile have been reported to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 45 states and the District of Columbia. There were 10 deaths from the mosquito-borne disease in the country as of September 1.

North Carolina has not released any information about the victim, including age, gender and location of the person who died.

"This is a tragic reminder that these infections, though relatively rare, can be fatal, "Dr. Carl Williams, State Public Health veterinarian, said in a statement. "We see most cases of mosquito-borne illness in the months from August through October, but you can still enjoy your time outdoors by following some basic control measures."

About 1 in 5 people infected with West Nile Virus will develop a fever with other symptoms. Less than 1 percent of infected people develop a serious, sometimes fatal, neurologic illness, the CDC said.

A second case of suspected plague has been reported in Yosemite, California, barely more than a week after a child contracted the disease after visiting the park.

Also known as the Black Death, this is the same bacterium (Yersinia pestis) that wiped out millions of people in the 14th century. While the disease is rare in the U.S., it's not defunct. On average, we'll see seven cases per year:
The reason for the 1983 spike you see in the chart above could have been a result of cool moist weather in the western US, which may have allowed fleas to survive for longer and extended the length of the plague season in some areas.

You can get infected from a flea bite or contact with infected tissues or fluids from handling an animal — such as a squirrel, chipmunk, or other rodent — that is sick with or died from the disease. You can also get it from inhaling droplets in the breath of infected cats or humans.

Most of the cases tend to crop up in the rural West, especially in southern Colorado, northern New Mexico, northern Arizona, California, southern Oregon, and western Nevada — places that rodents that carry the disease call home.


An infection causes flu-like symptoms such as high fever, chills, nausea, weakness and swollen lymph nodes in the neck, armpit, or groin.