[Closed] Rats got a bum rap over the Black Death it seems.

Pearl Jam have already covered that

What really happened ≠ some scientists theorising with computer models.

Unless you've been sitting on this for 2 years, it seems like a case of news aggregator feeding you stuff it knows you'll react to.

Before you read that article, check the number of cookies etc it wants to instal.

Looks like humans are the primary problem (spreaders) not rats.

Rats and their flees might have been the the spreader around a neighbourhood. But rats can't charter a stagecoach to take them from one town to another. Rich and influential humans were the key spreaders from town to town - people who could pay or negotiate their way out of measures that were trying contain the situation.

Similarly there was a radio interview recently with some in Wuhan - theres a strictly enforced ban on car travel but if he went outside there were still cars travelling about - but they are all executive saloons.

It was well enough known back then that people were generally a major vector for disease between communities. If you look the construction of castles with a grand hall and Minstrels Gallery- That gallery has its own door in and out of the building - there would be no connecting doors between the gallery and the rest of the building. People valued being visited by someone who had stories and news from other places but knew they brought the risk of disease from those other places too so minstrels pretty much lived and worked in quarantine.

I thought the experience of Eyam made it pretty clear that it was a range of sources that spread the various plagues - and how to contain it.

So I guess the flagellants did have a point then.

Rats or cookies? Which is the scariest?

Looks like humans are the primary problem (spreaders) not rats. Sounds familiar?

No, actually, the main carrier of Y. Pestis is the flea, rats carried fleas, and could and would hitch rides on anything where there might be food, like wagons, ships, etc, but humans didn’t have much of a sense of hygiene and knew nothing of disease and it’s vectors like we do now, and homes used straw on the floors, so a perfect combination of circumstances, rats could carry the fleas long distances on various forms of transportation, humans could spread the fleas quickly around their centres of habitation.
Of course, once any contagion gets a foothold, because of the incubation periods, involved then spread is inevitable regardless of whether its flea, rat or human.
Or bat...