Epidemiological studies is a fascinating blend of science and history. There’s a lot of ways we can benefit now from the study of past disease. The pock-marked friars shown here might well have been suffering from an illness that most folks today are blessedly free from: measles.
Measles is a human virus (MeV), but, like SARS-COV2, originated from other animals — in this case, the Rinderpest cattle virus (RPV). As such, it is a zoonotic disease, and thus hits “naive” populations (people who have never had contact with the pathogen) particularly hard. Smallpox and AIDS are two other infamous examples.
Historians had thought that measles started to diverge from Rinderpest about 1,000 years ago: the 9th century Islamic scholar Muhammad IBN Zakariya al-Razi was the first to distinguish measles from smallpox in his writings.
A more recent study in 2020 by Marc Suchard and others used genetic studies and mathematical computation applications to model the development of the virus. The team now believes that measles originated 1,500 years earlier than the previous assessment, sometime between 600 and 501 BCE in Eurasia. This would fit in with what historians know about the growth of cities during this time, because zoonotic diseases like measles need large gatherings of animals and people for the new disease to take hold and spread.
And spread measles did. Wikipedia cites an estimation of 200 million people dying from the disease between 1855 and 2005. Fortunately the measles vaccine has radically reduced this — between 2000-2017, the death rate declined by 85%. In developing areas of Africa and Asia measles is still a killer, especially among malnourished children. It spreads quicker than almost any other airborne pathogen, and people who are infected by it can have their immune system wrecked, because it destroys cells that make human antibodies.
Zoonotic disease, variants, contagion, and vaccine success are all important takeaways from the study of this ancient disease.
Source(s): “Research into origins of measles provides insight for dealing with current, future pandemics,’ @ph.ucla.edu, _AAAScience_, Thur June 18, 2020, Brad Smith citing Marc A. Suchard’s work. “Origin of Measles virus: divergence from Rinderpest virus between the 11th and 12th centuries,” Yuki Furuse et al, Virol J, 2010; 7: 52. Wikipedia.
