To believe or not to believe

Now, we are being told that new evidence points to airborne bacteria causing the 14th century plague in Britain and Europe that killed 20+ Million people .... not rat fleas.  

Vanessa Thorpe writing at GuardianUK:
.....Black death was not   spread by rat fleas, say researchers
Evidence from skulls in east London shows plague had to have been airborne to spread so quickly.
Archaeologists and forensic scientists who have examined 25 skeletons unearthed in the Clerkenwell area of London a year ago believe they have uncovered the truth about the nature of the Black Death that ravaged Britain and Europe in the mid-14th century.

Analysis of the bodies and of wills registered in London at the time has cast doubt on "facts" that every schoolchild has learned for decades: that the epidemic was caused by a highly contagious strain spread by the fleas on rats.



Now evidence taken from the human remains found in Charterhouse Square, to the north of the City of London, during excavations carried out as part of the construction of the Crossrail train line, have suggested a different cause: only an airborne infection could have spread so fast and killed so quickly.

The Black Death arrived in Britain from central Asia in the autumn of 1348 and by late spring the following year it had killed six out of every 10 people in London. Such a rate of destruction would kill five million now. By extracting the DNA of the disease bacterium, Yersinia pestis, from the largest teeth in some of the skulls retrieved from the square, the scientists were able to compare the strain of bubonic plague preserved there with that which was recently responsible for killing 60 people in Madagascar.  To their surprise, the 14th-century strain, the cause of the most lethal catastrophe in recorded history, was no more virulent than today's disease. The DNA codes were an almost perfect match............

From Reuters:
.... Archaeologists in Britain   said on Sunday they had solved a 660-year-old mystery, citing DNA tests which they said proved they had found a lost burial site for tens of thousands of people killed in medieval London by the "Black Death" plague.

The breakthrough follows the discovery last year of 13 skeletons wrapped in shrouds laid out in neat rows during excavations for London's new Crossrail rail line, Europe's biggest infrastructure project.

Archaeologists, who say the find sheds new light on medieval England and its inhabitants, later found 12 more skeletons taking the total to 25. They will further excavate the site in July to see if more bodies are buried nearby.........