No human being has caught it in New York City (NYC) for at least a century, but still, there it was, researchers said, in places touched by hundreds, maybe thousands, of people every day.
After swabbing more than 400 subway stations in a search for all kinds of microorganisms, researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College reported last week that they had found evidence of bubonic plague, the Black Death that ravaged 14th-century Europe.
Everyone who rides the subway knows it is teeming with rats, which — in the right environment — can be infested with fleas that can carry plague. Medieval quantities of rats.
Could a subway turnstile be all that is standing between New Yorkers and a nearly forgotten disease?
Probably not.
On Friday, a day after the study’s release, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene questioned whether the researchers had turned up the plague at all.
“We do not know what bacteria they found, but it is definitely not the plague,” department spokesman Levi Fishman said.
The study’s authors hedged a bit, allowing that what they thought was the plague could have been a different bacterium — or the plague.
“We are saying there is evidence for these things, but no one should worry,” geneticist and lead study author Christopher Mason said.
The study, published on Thursday in the online journal Cell Systems, was intended to create a kind of microbial map of New York City’s subway system, collecting and analyzing the DNA of the humans, insects, bacteria, plants, viruses and other types of life that compose the subterranean melting pot. Most of what was found is harmless.
However, the researchers found fragments of DNA associated with two pathogens: anthrax — which Mason guessed might have originated from livestock and has not been seen in the city in several years — and plague. None of those fragments was in live samples, meaning that they could not have infected anyone touching them.
If it is the plague that the team found, the discovery is quite a breakthrough, given how long it has been since the disease was present in the city.
Fishman said “a complex ecology” that does not occur in New York City — “much less on the subway” — is needed for humans to contract plague.
The bubonic plague did find its way to New York in 2002, traveling with two visitors from a ranch in New Mexico, where the disease is endemic among flea-bitten wild animals, including prairie dogs.
Mason said it was possible other tourists had carried the bacterium onto the subway, even if it had not been detected before.
The US sees an average of seven cases of bubonic plague a year, concentrated in the rural west, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.
The study found fragments of DNA associated with the bubonic plague in disparate parts of the city: on a garbage can in Manhattan, a stairway railing in Queens and another railing in Brooklyn.
Mason said his team wondered how rats were able to balance on railings.
“I am not an expert on rodent physiology, so we had these funny jokes about acrobatic rodents,” he said.
However, he said it was also possible that currents of air created by moving trains lifted the DNA from the ground, “so it comes from the aerodynamics of the subway.”
Fishman conceded that rats “have been known to frequent the NYC subway.”
However, he said: “No infected rat has ever been found in NYC.”
What the researchers probably found, he said, were bacteria from an unknown species or from organisms that happened to share some gene sequences with the plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis.
Mason agreed that his team might have detected some other bacterium masquerading as plague.
It is also possible “that the plague was actually there,” he said.
“To truly know if it is the plague, you have to take a piece and infect someone,” he said.
To prove their good faith, he said, the researchers plan to post a more extensive explanation of their data online, so that “literally a middle school student could do some of the analysis.”
Assuming it was plague, Mason had a theory for why it had not wiped out New York City.
“The strain of plague from the Middle Ages was a particularly bad strain,” he said.
“New York City today by comparison — even though some people might complain — it is a far cleaner environment than the Middle Ages,” he said.
What is next for Mason and his pathogen-mapping team?
First they will see whether they can link the suspected plague DNA to rats, he said.
Then they will try to refine their DNA matching to look for two other pests: cockroaches and bedbugs.
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