Stop Press

Following the series of images posted a few weeks ago now of Stamford Green Pond, I have to report today that the level is now an inch or so below the spillway.

Maybe it is the combination of the continuing lack of serious rain and Thames Water having mended the leak somewhere upstream, which last had, at least, put some water into the pond. Enough to keep it full.

The water being stagnant also meant that it was acquiring an unsightly sheen. A sheen which even a modest outflow seems to clear. Just about visible around the island in the snap above.

Then there is the business of the plague, which has popped up in central Asia, brought to my attention by the piece at reference 1, from where I branched to reference 2. Plus some help from Wikipedia, plus some help from Gemini.

It seems that while the number of cases is small, say less than 1,000 a year worldwide, the plague is still endemic in certain parts of the world, in particular Mongolia. It is still a dangerous disease, still killing around 10% of those infected, even with the proper treatment - and mostly fatal to humans without treatment.

The plague is caused by the bug yersina pestis of reference 4, transmitted by fleas from one animal to another. Some forms of the plague are also airborne and are very infectious. The fleas usually succumb too.

Reference 2 is something of a survey, building on the results of DNA analysis of ancient instances of the bug; DNA which, on a good day, can be extracted from the teeth of humans and other animals who died of the plague a long time ago, leaving only their skeletons now. The sort of thing that Reich talks about in his book at reference 6, which has been noticed in the other place from time to time.

The Green story seems to be that the great European plague of the 14th century - the Black Death - can be traced to the Mongol invasions from central Asia, where the plague lives on in a small way to this day, invasions which had started in the previous century. Invasions which were associated with marmots - a large rodent which the Mongols liked to eat - and with the movements of the grain supplies which were needed to feed the soldiers - and which rodents more generally liked to eat too. I note that rats have been regarded as an important vector in the past.

Also that there were other plagues in other parts of Asia, in particular in China, at around the same time. Green does, I think, go into why these plagues did not leave the documentary trace, the documentary record that we have here in Europe, but I did not get far enough into that to report on that here. Furthermore, the Mongol armies themselves may have been struck down by plague from time to time.

But stories of them catapulting infected corpses over the walls of places they were besieging were probably untrue.

I imagine that there are lots of systems people out there trying to model the complex dynamics of all this through space and time. The interactions of the sociable humans, their food supplies, the other four legged animals, the blood-sucking fleas and the bacteria that do the damage, that is to say the aforementioned yersina pestis.

PS 1: at reference 8, a chance pick-me-up from RPPL, Wilson takes a rather negative view of the 200 year stay of the British in India and I do not remember him mentioning the episode below, lifted from Wikipedia:

'... Bacteriologist Waldemar Haffkine developed the first plague vaccine in 1897. He conducted a massive inoculation program in British India, and it is estimated that 26 million doses of Haffkine's anti-plague vaccine were sent out from Bombay between 1897 and 1925, reducing the plague mortality by 50–85%...'.

I shall have to check the index.

PS 2: Bing turns up lots of systems stuff on the clue: 'systems analysis plague dynamics'. See, for example, reference 9, from which the snap above is taken.

PS 3: Wednesday: it looks as if all will be well after all. POTUS is on the case. See reference 10.

References

Reference 1: US ‘monitoring’ situation around suspected case of plague in Russia: Moscow has imposed sweeping quarantine measures in Siberia after death of plague research institute worker - Anastasia Stognei, Katya Arenina, Financial Times - 2026.

Reference 2: The Four Black Deaths - Monica H. Green - 2020.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_(disease).

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yersinia_pestis.

Reference 5: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/rr/rr7003a1.htm?s_cid=rr7003a1_w. Inter alia, quite into the biological warfare aspects.

Reference 6: Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past – David Reich – 2018.

Reference 7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marmot.

Reference 8: India conquered: Britain’s Raj and the chaos of empire – Jon Wilson – 2016.

Reference 9: Compartmental mathematical modelling of plague: analysis of human-rodent-vector dynamics and epidemic threshold – Abdraman Annour Saad, Djimramadji Hippolyte, Mahamat Saleh Daoussa Haggar – 2026. University of N’Djamena, Chad. Published in India.

Reference 10: Donald Trump says he will speak with Vladimir Putin about pneumonic plague: Washington increases pressure on Moscow to share more about the incident in which one person has died - Steff Chávez, Financial Times - 2026.