• Question: how did the black death stop? did they find a cure or did it just die out?

    Asked by Flori to Angela, Claire, Ian, Robert, Sarah on 19 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Angela Stokes

      Angela Stokes answered on 19 Nov 2014:

      Hi Flori
      To be honest no-one really knows. It is thought that a combination of quarantining people who were ill already, having better hygeine and boiling water before drinking, and people travelling to areas where the air was cleaner had a lot to do with it.

    • Photo: Ian Cade

      Ian Cade answered on 19 Nov 2014:

      Just to add to Angela’s post: Diseases also tend to get less deadly with time for two reasons.

      1) Partly, all the folk who survived last year’s bout of black death are more likely to survive this year’s dose (and these people go on to have kids who will have an increased chance of carrying this resistance to Black Death… unlike those others who died from the disease… who being dead are no longer in a position to have kids)

      2) But also, its not really in the interests of a disease causing organism to kill its host (or at least not too quickly). The virus or bacterium also ‘wants’ to have offspring… and those organisms that are able to infect a host and reproduce but *without* killing the host are just more likely to successfully reproduce.

      Essentially, people evolved to be more resistant to the disease and the bacterium evolved to be less deadly.

      This was especially apparent with smallpox when Europeans travelled to the US around 500 years ago. The European colonists were much more resistant to smallpox than the local natives… who were very susceptible to the disease (the native American death rate was between 50 and 80%… compared to the Europeans for whom the death rate was about 30%)

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