WARM springs and wet summers make an outbreak of bubonic plague more likely.
The plague is caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which is carried by rodents. Using field data from Kazakhstan spanning 1949 to 1995, a team of researchers led by Nils Stenseth of the University of Oslo, Norway, studied how the number of gerbils infected by plague changes with the weather. Both rainy summers and warmer springs increased the bacteria’s prevalence (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0602447103). In particular, the team found a 1 °C rise in spring temperature increases the prevalence of plague in rodents by 60 per cent.…
