A team tested the ancient mummy dating back more than 3,000 years and discovered the bubonic plague in his bone tissue and intestines, making it the first found outside medieval Eurasia
Samples of the Black Death, which wiped out as many as 50 million people in medieval Europe, have been found in an ancient Egyptian mummy.
The pandemic, also known as bubonic plague, spread quickly through the continent on the fleas carried by rats. Symptoms of the killer disease included horrific skin sores, swollen lymph nodes and a sudden high fever and it got its grisly nickname as victims’ tongues would turn black.
Recently, a team of archaeologists took samples from an ancient Egyptian mummy housed at the Museo Egizio in Turin, Italy. Both bone tissue and intestinal content was taken from the male corpse -dating back to around 1780BC.
Both samples came back with yersinia pestis – the Black Death. It is the first discovery of the disease outside of medieval Europe and Asia.
In a report by the European Meeting of the Paleopathology Association, the team said: “Here, we report the presence of Y. pestis DNA in an ancient Egyptian mummy of an adult male from the collection of the Museo Egizio in Turin, Italy. The individual, who was anthropogenically mummified, was radiocarbon-dated from the end of the Second Intermediate Period to the beginning of the New Kingdom, yet its exact provenance within Egypt is unknown.
“Bone tissue and intestinal content derived from the mummy were first subjected to a shotgun metagenomics approach. Thereby, we detected Y. pestis DNA in both samples indicating broad tissue tropism of the pathogen during an already advanced state of disease progression.
“This is the first reported prehistoric Y. pestis genome outside Eurasia providing molecular evidence for the presence of plague in ancient Egypt, although we cannot infer how widespread the disease was during this time.”
As many as seven cases of the plague are still made today. Thankfully, if caught early, it can be easily treated with antibiotics.
While the plague is not currently in the UK, it is present in Africa, Asia, South America and the USA, with 3,248 cases reported between 2010 and 2015, according to Public Health England.
The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has stated there is currently “no change to health risk in England” regarding the plague. It also publishes surveillance reports on infectious disease for animal and human health.
Speaking last year, after a case was confirmed in the US, Michael Marks, a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine said: “People with plague are very sick. They aren’t getting on planes basically. So the way plague moves around the world isn’t individuals with plague (unlike say COVID) but by infected animals.
“The risk to the UK is extremely low, close to zero, as evidenced by the fact that cases continue in the USA every year but we don’t see cases reach the UK.”
