boris.earth

NORDEMICS is a Scandinavian consortium that aims to understand how changes in society and climate influenced epidemics in the Nordic countries in the past 300 years.

REA:Life is a collaboration between researchers from the National and Cultural History, Pharmacy and Biology departments at the University of Oslo, Norway. We investigate lost medicinal recipes, and test these for bioactive compounds using the latest methods in pharmacology, immunology and metagenomics.

Plague is still widespread, but the rules for where plague can exist in the wild are unknown. For non-ecologists, it is tempting to assume that certain rodent species are associated with plague reservoirs, but that intuition breaks down rapidly when you start comparing rodent species maps with plague reservoir maps.

Plague has infected humans for thousands of years, and people have written about plague for hundreds of years. You could start with this short reading list if you want to catch up.

One of the first queries that comes up when you google "how many people died of", is how many people died of the (black) plague. Unfortunately, pretty much every answer that you can find online is wrong.