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by fach 1653 days ago
Did the Spanish flu not evolve into our less lethal, seasonal flu?
2 comments
paul_f 1652 days ago
Yes, this is correct. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/will-coronavir...
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catlikesshrimp 1653 days ago
I don't think so. I also don't know why the black plague (Yersinia Pestis) ended.

Wikipedia theories are as reliable as usual. (Not reliable)

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noduerme 1652 days ago
Yersinia Pestis is a bacterium, not a virus, and it can be killed by antibiotics. It's not gone. It's still around in fleas that live on squirrels and rats. In the mountains near where I live, the squirrels have it, and people get it every couple years.

But that may or may not be what caused the black death in medieval Europe, in my view. There's reason to think it might have been a really nasty hemorhagic virus like Ebola. See: https://history.howstuffworks.com/historical-events/black-de...

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catlikesshrimp 1652 days ago
Antibiotics hadn't been discovered when the black plague ended. The bubonic plague that can described today is not the black plague.

There had been several pandemics of black plague, but at some point it didn't come back. Why?

Maybe there was a bacteriophague virus which caused Yersinia Pestis to be lethal? (Hypothesis) But why would it be gone?

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27281573/

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