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Saturday 20th of April 2024, 04:24 CET |
| 14th Century Tartar Bioterror |
November 6, 2002
Reuters
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Written by E. J. Mundell
Posted by HW on April 20, 2024
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Imagine populations in the West terrified by the prospect of biological attack from enemies lurking deep within central Asia.
Sound familiar? For the inhabitants of Europe nearly 700 years ago, the threat of bioterrorism--in those days from Mongol hordes storming across Russia--was all too real. And historians say that in at least one incident, the "Tartars" succeeded in unleashing the bacterium responsible for the Black Death on a trapped and helpless citizenry.
Medieval lesson
In 1346 "the Mongol army hurled plague-infected cadavers into the besieged Crimean city of Caffa, thereby transmitting the disease to the inhabitants," writes Dr. Mark Wheelis, a microbiologist and expert on bioterrorism at the University of California, Davis. He believes the medieval attack could provide lessons on the magnitude of the bioterror threat facing the world today.
Mysterious Illness
In his contemporary account of the Black Death, the Italian Gabriele de' Mussi tells of a "mysterious illness" sweeping across Russia and decimating the advancing Mongols led by Janibeg, Khan of the Golden Horde.
Mongols vs. Italians
As the death toll from the plague mounted, so did tensions between the warlike Mongols and Italians plying their trade on the Black Sea. Those tensions exploded in 1343, with the Tartars laying siege to Caffa, an Italian trading outpost.
Three years into the siege, however, the plague began to spread among the Mongol troops surrounding Caffa.
Catapults
"The dying Tartars, stunned and stupified by the immensity of the disaster brought about by the disease, and realizing they had no hope of escape, lost interest in the siege," de' Mussi wrote. "But they ordered corpses to be placed in catapults and lobbed into the city in the hope that the intolerable stench would kill everyone inside." Medieval Europeans believed that the very odor of rotting corpses could prove fatal.
Their plan worked. "What seemed like mountains of dead were thrown into the city, and the Christians could not hide or flee or escape from them," de' Mussi added. "Soon the rotting corpses tainted the air and poisoned the water supply, and...one infected man could carry the poison to others." Almost all of the inhabitants of Caffa died from the disease, according to the account.
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Horrific tales like these spread as quickly as the plague itself throughout Europe, and for centuries after the Black Death many historians pointed to the Caffa bioterror attack as the root cause of the epidemic.
Caffa not sole cause
But Wheelis disputes that claim. Writing in a recent issue of the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, he notes that the introduction of the Black Death into Europe occurred at multiple points--not just in Italy, the homeland to which most infected Caffan survivors would have fled.
Instead, ships returning from Asia, infested with rats carrying the plague bacterium, were the probable main means of transmission of the Black Death from Asia into Europe. The epidemic killed an estimated one out of every three Europeans--25 million people--between 1347 and 1352.
No reason to relax
Still, Wheelis believes the relatively minor impact on public health of the Siege of Caffa is no reason for 21st-century policymakers to relax in the face of today's germ warfare threat.
He explained that while bubonic plague remains a "difficult agent" for bioterrorists to use, another agent--smallpox--could trigger a modern health catastrophe on par with the 14th-century Black Death.
"If deliberately released in multiple places simultaneously, it would be very unlikely that (smallpox) could be prevented from spreading worldwide," he told Reuters Health. Especially in the developing world, "tens or hundreds of millions of deaths would be a certainty," he warned.
Source:
Emerging Infectious Diseases 2002;8:971-975.
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol8no9/01-0536.htm |
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