Getting rid of vermin might not be beneficial
If every rat, cockroach and bedbug disappeared from New York City, would that be a good thing, ecologically speaking? “We would avoid the diseases, bites and frightful moments that they bring to our lives,” said Steven N. Handel, professor of ecology and evolution at Rutgers University, but problems might result from the emergence of other species to fill their niches in cleaning up human leftovers. Like many of New York City’s people and weeds, many of its pests came from other continents, including bedbugs, cockroaches and European rats. In fact, Handel said, concentrations of people “are the ground zero of the pest explosion,” providing both warm shelter and garbage to feed upon. Handel said that the disappearance of bedbugs would probably leave no serious bad consequences but that eliminating some of the other vermin might mean “simply exchanging one suite of kitchen crashers for another, albeit smaller and less visually frightening.” Microbes are everywhere and carry their own public health problems, he continued. “If it’s goodbye cockroaches, then it’s hello fungi,” Handel suggested. “We will never be alone.”

Clues to Black Plague’s fury in 650-year-old skeletons
Many historians have assumed that Europe’s deadliest plague, the Black Death of 1347 to 1351, killed indiscriminately, young and old, hardy and frail, healthy and sick alike. But two anthropologists were not so sure. They decided to take a closer look at the skeletons of people buried more than 650 years ago. Their findings, published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that the plague selectively took the already ill, while the otherwise healthy survived the infection. In the new study, the researchers examined 490 skeletons exhumed from the East Smithfield cemetery in London. The site, like many other cemeteries, was set up to bury victims of the Black Death and was almost certainly used for no other purpose. The scientists determined the victims’ state of health when they died by counting bone lesions, defects that suggest previous infections and other existing health problems. The researchers also estimated age at death by noting dental development and using other established methods. As a comparison, they analysed the bones of 291 genetically and culturally similar people buried in a Danish cemetery shortly before the plague began. Among the East Smithfield plague victims, bone lesions were also associated with excess mortality. In other words, many of those people were already in poor health when the Black Death struck. (NYT)