How gruesome ancient diseases like Black Death are coming back to life ‘thanks to anti-vaxxers & corpse dance rituals’
IT killed 200million people when it ravaged the globe in medieval times – and the Black Death is now rearing its head once more.
On Saturday, a herdsman was found to have bubonic plague in the Chinese region of Inner Mongolia.
It follows two brothers being diagnosed with the plague after eating marmot meat in neighbouring country of Mongolia last week.
The killer bacterial infection, which is often spread by flea-ridden rodents, may also have spread to a second patient in the city of Bayannur in China, sparking an epidemic warning.
Alarmingly, this isn’t the first time that plague has broken out in recent years – and it’s not the only medieval disease to return from the shadows and claim new victims in the 21st century.
Here, we reveal how gruesome practices like ‘corpse dancing’ and barmy anti-vaxx conspiracists have seen some of the world’s most feared viruses spring back to life.
Plague spread through ‘corpse dancing’ deaths
The last person to die from the plague in the UK was Geoffrey Bacon, a scientist at the Microbiological Research Establishment, in 1962.
He was accidentally infected with the disease at Porton Down in Wiltshire, the Government’s chemical weapon research centre – but much larger, natural plague outbreaks have occurred in the 21st century.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Peru, and Madagascar are most often blighted by the plague.
Outbreaks are so common in Madagascar that the country is even said to have its own “plague season” between October and April.
Just six years ago, 71 people died from the plague on the island off the coast of East Africa.
The outbreak was of both the bubonic plague and pneumonic plague.
Bubonic plague is more common and affects the patient’s lymphatic system – a network of tubes and nodes running throughout the body that is part of your immune system.
Pneumonic plague, on the other hand, is a much more dangerous infection of the lungs and can be easily spread from person to person via droplets.
In 2017, 221 people died from the plague in Madagascar in one of the worst modern epidemics of the disease.
Poor waste management and a lack of clean water give diseases rats and fleas the perfect breeding ground in which to spread the plague.
And Madagascar’s poor health infrastructure means testing and early treatment of the plague – which are vital for patients’ survival – aren’t always available.
The local practice of Famadihana or “the turning of the bones” is also thought to spread the plague and other infectious diseases.
In the ceremony, relatives exhume their loved ones’ dead bodies from crypts, rewrap the corpse in fresh cloth, and dance around the tomb with the body before returning them to the grave.
Although the Madagascar government has forbidden the custom for people who died of the plague, many families ignore the decree.
“I will always practice the turning of the bones of my ancestors — plague or no plague,” one woman told the New Straits Times.
“The plague is a lie.”
Measles springs from anti-vaxx spike
Even in wealthy countries, once-vanquished diseases like measles are returning for completely different reasons.
In severe cases, measles patients can go blind, develop pneumonia, or suffer swelling of the brain.
Around 20million people get measles every year globally, of which tens of thousands die, with developing countries in Africa and Asia worst affected.
In 2000, measles was completely eliminated from the US thanks to widespread vaccination programmes developed and implemented since the 1960s.
But in 2019, there were a staggering 1,282 cases of the extremely contagious disease across 31 different states, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
It was the worst year for measles in the US since 1992 and the situation became so extreme that a state of emergency was declared in New York City and Washington.
Experts blamed the spike in cases on the rise of anti-vaccination or “anti-vaxx” movements, which spread unscientific conspiracies about the risks of vaccinations.
One study by Health Testing Centers found that between 2009 and 2018, 27 of the 50 states had seen a drop in the number of vaccinated kindergarten-age kids because of growing anti-vaxx sentiment.
“Without urgent efforts to increase vaccination coverage… we risk losing decades of progress in protecting children and communities against this devastating but entirely preventable disease,” said Dr Soumya Swaminathan, deputy director general for programmes at the World Health Organization.
Rib-crushing whooping cough
In certain cases, dated vaccines might themselves be to blame for the return of the disease, as is thought to be the case with whooping cough.
The brutal condition, also known as pertussis, is named after the agonising sound made by patients when inhaling after long and painful coughing fits.
The bacterial infection causes coughing so extreme that sufferers break their own ribs, vomit, and the condition can kill babies.
Around 16.3million people got whooping cough in 2015, the majority of which are in the developing world.
But it’s also thought to be the only vaccine-preventable disease associated with an increase in deaths in the US.
There were also 25,891 cases diagnosed in the UK between 2012 and 2018 compared to 6,216 between 2005 and 2011 – a four-fold increase.
Although a vaccine is offered to all babies in Britain – where 18 have died from whooping cough since 2012 – it doesn’t offer lifelong protection and is now less effective than it was 15 years ago.
It’s thought that genetic mutations in whooping cough bacteria mean our current vaccine is now outdated.
“The pertussis vaccine is not optimal,” Dr William Schaffner, professor of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, told NBC.
“We’re making the best use of the vaccine while we’re frantically doing research to make a better one.”
Polio thrives in ravaged warzones
Other diseases are making a resurgence as a grim consequence of war – including polio.
It’s been documented since the time of the ancient Egyptians and was once one of the most feared childhood illnesses in Europe and North America, sometimes causing muscle weakness in the legs, paralysis and even death.
An estimated 35,000 people were killed by polio each year in the US alone during major outbreaks of the disease in the 1940s and 1950s, according to the CDC.
But since the widespread availability of vaccines against the poliovirus, the number of worldwides cases has fallen dramatically.
WHO estimates there’s been a 99.9 per cent reduction in global cases each year from an estimated 350,000 in 1988 to a low of 483 cases in 2001.
But Afghanistan and Pakistan remain the only countries in the world where polio is endemic.
That’s in part due to the war in Afghanistan, which disrupted vaccination efforts by making some areas politically difficult or physically dangerous to access.
And in Pakistan, the CIA launched a fake Hepatitis vaccination campaign in 2011 in a bid to confirm the location of Osama Bin Laden.
The plan was to collect DNA samples from Bin Laden’s kids using blood left on the needles of Hepatitis B vaccinations.
After the al-Qaeda founder’s assassination in Pakistan, the Taliban began killing polio vaccination workers, accusing them of being part of intelligence-gathering operations.
Some 70 polio workers have been killed in Pakistan since 2012 and polio cases rose from 198 in 2011 to 306 in 2014.
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Islamist militants also told Pakistanis that vaccination programmes were a Western plot to sterilise their children.
Some of the worst affected regions were reclaimed from the Taliban in 2015 and vaccination efforts could start again.
In 2019, the country had 146 documented cases.