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It Got Better: Life Improved After Black Death, Study Finds
The Black Death, a plague that first devastated Europe in the 1300s, had a silver lining. After the ravages of the disease, surviving Europeans lived longer, a new study finds.
….In the centuries before the Black Death, about 10 percent of people lived past age 70, said study researcher Sharon DeWitte, a biological anthropologist at the University of South Carolina. In the centuries after, more than 20 percent of people lived past that age.
Are We At The Dawn Of The Age of Epidemics?
Over the past several weeks and months, we've seen a startling number of disease outbreaks pop up around the globe. It's a trend that's not completely surprising — one that could characterize the coming decades as the Age of Epidemics. Here are some of the scariest new diseases you need to know about.
The First Case of MERS in the U.S.
WHO Declares Polio a Public Health Emergency
Measles On the Rise
Chikungunya Virus is Proliferating Rapidly in the Caribbean
Dengue Fever Continues to Spread
Ebola Ravages West Africa
The H5N1 Avian Flu Is Mutating in Bangladesh
New Kind of Bird Flu Has Been Found in Antarctic Penguins
Bovine Leukemia Is Transmissible to Humans
A Mysterious Kidney Disease Is Afflicting Male Farmworkers in Central America
MRSA and the Pending Antibiotic Apocalypse
originally posted by: ketsuko
More like, the strong survive and they breed to create more strong offspring.
Look at what happens in populations of organisms regularly treated with toxins that wipe nearly all of them out. Nearly. The ones who are left are super resistant, super strong and breed more like themselves. I'm not just talking about bacteria, but look at common household pests like cockroaches. There are roaches in NY that can't easily be killed by pesticides anymore and rats that are Coumadin resistant.
So what's the real message here? There's a black cloud on the horizon but it has a silver lining? The fit survive -or- Survivors are more fit than they were before infection?
originally posted by: PhoenixOD
a reply to: soficrow
So what's the real message here? There's a black cloud on the horizon but it has a silver lining? The fit survive -or- Survivors are more fit than they were before infection?
...Many of the survivors carries a gene mutation that made them almost immune to the disease.
Unexpected Inheritance: Multiple Integrations of Ancient Bornavirus and Ebolavirus/Marburgvirus Sequences in Vertebrate Genomes
….In 19 of the tested vertebrate species, we discovered as many as 80 high-confidence examples of genomic DNA sequences that appear to be derived, as long ago as 40 million years, from ancestral members of 4 currently circulating virus families with single strand RNA genomes. Surprisingly, almost all of the sequences are related to only two families in the Order Mononegavirales: the Bornaviruses and the Filoviruses, which cause lethal neurological disease and hemorrhagic fevers, respectively. ….The conservation of relatively long open reading frames for several of the endogenous sequences, the virus-like protein regions represented, and a potential correlation between their presence and a species' resistance to the diseases caused by these pathogens, are consistent with the notion that their products provide some important biological advantage to the species. ….the examples described here should be considered a low estimate of the number of such integration events that have persisted over evolutionary time scales. Clearly, the sources of genetic information in vertebrate genomes are much more diverse than previously suspected.
…..a separately derived primate lineage (comprising marmosets, macaques, chimps, and humans) contains endogenous BDV gene N-related sequences integrated into seven different places in the genomes. …..In the primate line these sites first appear in the present day marmosets and have been retained over forty million years from a common ancestor of marmosets and humans (Figure 2). ……several integrations show signs of strong positive selection, namely those related to the BDV N gene in humans, microbats, rodents, and other animals, and both the EBOV/MARV NP and VP35 gene-related integrations in bats and tarsier. Some integration events, including the BDV N-like sequences in humans (e.g. hsEBLN-1) and the EBOV VP35-like sequences in microbats (mlEEL35) have maintained nearly full-length open reading frames (Table 2). The probability of having no stop codon in the longest of these, the BDV gene N-like integration in humans, is one in eight hundred, suggesting that at some time, past or present, there was strong selective pressure to keep and express this ancestral viral gene.
Lateral gene transfer (LGT) from bacteria to animals occurs more frequently than was appreciated prior to the advent of genome sequencing.
Bacterial DNA in Human Genomes
A new study finds strong evidence that bacteria can transfer genes into human genomes
….Danchin agrees that the results need to be validated but said, “…. I think LGT happens much more frequently than we imagine but, most of the time, is just not detectable.”
Bacteria-Human Somatic Cell Lateral Gene Transfer Is Enriched in Cancer Samples
….There are 10× more bacterial cells in the human body than there are human cells that are part of the human microbiome. Many of those bacteria are in constant, intimate contact with human cells. We sought to establish if bacterial cells insert their own DNA into the human genome. Such random mutations could cause disease in the same manner that mutagens like UV rays from the sun or chemicals in cigarettes induce mutations. We detected the integration of bacterial DNA in the human genome more readily in tumors than normal samples.
Infectious Disease as an Evolutionary Paradigm
The basic principles of genetics and evolution apply equally to human hosts and to emerging infections, in which foodborne outbreaks play an important and growing role. However, we are dealing with a very complicated coevolutionary process in which infectious agent outcomes range from mutual annihilation to mutual integration and resynthesis of a new species.
...just being immune to a disease and being more 'fit' because of it isn't a given