Black Death - Ancestor of ALL Modern Plagues?

 I'd hate to be this guy (a plague doctor; ameteur doctors who got paid to treat victims of the bubonic plague. Since the 14th century, plague doctors wore beak-like masks, and inside the tips of the beaks would be aromatic items e.g. flowers, because they thought that those nice-smelling things would ward off the bad-smelling plague bacteria. Obviously, they were wrong).

The Bubonic plague of the Middle Ages isn't a new concept - practically everyone's heard of it. Everything from its first coming to Europe (the Justinian plague, named after the Roman emperor who ruled at that time, Justinian), how it was originally a bacteria that was in the soil and mutated to infect humans, and was spread because of fleas on rats on cargo ships. And of course, how a majority of the European population was wiped out because of this plague! However, new research suggests that the Bubonic plague (scientific name: Yersinia pestis) is now the ancestor of practically every modern plague!

The skull that had its tooth used to help map the genome of the black death.

Scientists have done this by extracting a tooth from a black death victim during the 14th century (when the Bubonic plague was at its worst). The black death victim was from London England's East Smithfield burial ground (which was a burial ground for the plague victims). From this single tooth, they have successfully sequenced the black death's genome.

Analyses show that the plague hasn't changed much over the last couple of centuries (it evolves slowly), and ergo; many modern Yersinia pestis epidemics have their roots from the medieval plague.

This is a quote from History.com that really intrigues me.

“The data that we’ve collected for this particular paper reveals something very fascinating about the origins of plague,” explained co-author Hendrik Poinar, an evolutionary geneticist at McMaster University in Canada. “They show that the medieval plague of 1348 London is the ancestor of all modern plagues that we have in existence around the world today. That means a plague outbreak in India last year, one in Africa not that long ago and one very recently in Colorado all have their origins in London 1348, in the midst of the Black Death.”

REFERENCES

http://www.history.com/news/2011/10/12/is-the-black-death-the-ancestor-of-all-modern-plagues/

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/10/111012-plague-black-death-yersinia-pestis-genetics-nature-health/