Medieval Europe was the perfect breeding ground for disease — overcrowded towns, open sewers, contaminated water, and no understanding of bacteria. People lived among filth, rats, and rotting waste, ...

Leprosy is one of the oldest recorded diseases in human history and is still prevalent to this day in Asia, Africa, and South America. While scientists have traced the evolutionary history of the ...

When Kathleen Walker-Meikle, a historian at the University of Basel, in Switzerland, ponders the Middle Ages, her mind tends to drift not to religious conquest or Viking raids, but to squirrels. Tawny ...

Previous research had found leprosy in modern red squirrels, and genetic analysis suggested the strain was closely related to leprosy found in medieval humans. Don Hooper / Loop Images / Universal ...

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A researcher in the Global Irish Studies Initiative at Georgetown University (GIS) explored the early medieval history of animal disease in Ireland at a talk March 27. Singer said that although other ...

A red squirrel eating a hazlenut Alverstone Mead Nature Reserve in Sandown, England. (Credit: Peter Trimming, CC by 2.0 Generic) (CN) — The history of leprosy has been rewritten, thanks to a study ...

Laura holds a Master's in Experimental Neuroscience and a Bachelor's in Biology from Imperial College London. Her areas of expertise include health, medicine, psychology, and neuroscience. Laura holds ...

The outbreak of plague in 1346-53, known as the Black Death, was one of the worst pandemics in recorded history. Between a ...

Evidence from archaeological sites in the medieval English city of Winchester shows that English red squirrels once served as an important host for Mycobacterium leprae strains that caused leprosy in ...