{"id":149616,"date":"2022-11-06T23:22:23","date_gmt":"2022-11-07T05:22:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/11\/black-death-survivors-gave-their-descendants-a-genetic-advantage-but-with-a-cost"},"modified":"2022-11-06T23:22:23","modified_gmt":"2022-11-07T05:22:23","slug":"black-death-survivors-gave-their-descendants-a-genetic-advantage-but-with-a-cost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/11\/black-death-survivors-gave-their-descendants-a-genetic-advantage-but-with-a-cost","title":{"rendered":"Black Death survivors gave their descendants a genetic advantage \u2014 but with a cost"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/black-death-survivors-gave-their-descendants-a-genetic-advantage-but-with-a-cost2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>This could give more immunity to viruses with the gene they found helped people survive the black death.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>\u201cWe all think that COVID-19 was insane and completely changed the world and our societies,\u201d Barreiro says. \u201cCOVID has a <a href=\"https:\/\/ourworldindata.org\/mortality-risk-covid\">mortality rate<\/a> of about 0.05% \u2013 something like that. Now try to project \u2013 if it\u2019s even possible \u2013 a scenario where 30 to 50% of the population dies.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Now a new study, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-022-05349-x\">published<\/a> Wednesday in the journal <em>Nature<\/em>, shows that the Black Death altered more than society: It also likely altered the evolution of the European people\u2019s genome.<\/p>\n<p>In the study, Barreiro and his colleagues found that Black Death survivors in London and Denmark had an edge in their genes \u2013 mutations that helped protect against the plague pathogen, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cdc.gov\/plague\/index.html\"><em>Yersinia pestis<\/em><\/a>. Survivors passed those mutations onto their descendants, and many Europeans still carry those mutations today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This could give more immunity to viruses with the gene they found helped people survive the black death. \u201cWe all think that COVID-19 was insane and completely changed the world and our societies,\u201d Barreiro says. \u201cCOVID has a mortality rate of about 0.05% \u2013 something like that. Now try to project \u2013 if it\u2019s even [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,385,412],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-149616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-evolution","category-genetics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=149616"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149616\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=149616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=149616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=149616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}