How thin the veneer on civilization can be - from The New York Times:
Bubonic Plague in the Subway System? Don’t Worry About It
No human being has caught it in New York City for at least a century, but still, there it was, researchers said, in places touched by hundreds, maybe thousands, of people every day.
After swabbing more than 400 subway stations for all kinds of microorganisms, researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College reported this week that they had found evidence at points across the city of bubonic plague, the Black Death that ravaged 14th-century Europe.
This was hardly surprising. Everyone who rides the subway knows it is teeming with rats, which in the right environment can be infested with fleas that carry plague. Medieval quantities of rats.
It also is scary. Could a subway turnstile be all that is standing between New Yorkers and a nearly forgotten disease?
Just a little mutation, someone with a compromised immune system, a random happening of bad luck. That is all that stands between us and chaos.
The full paper can be found here: Geospatial Resolution of Human and Bacterial Diversity with City-Scale Metagenomics
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