What was the Eyam Plague?
No one knows – when people lived in crowded conditions before soap or antibiotics, many infectious diseases were fatal. The usual assumption – that Eyam was ravaged by bubonic plague – rests upon shaky evidence. Diseases such as measles or flu have been equally deadly when introduced to isolated communities in recent times. However, a Channel 4 program shown in Feb. ’02, featured the work of an American geneticist, Stephen O’Brien, who found that the D32 gene, which gives a measure of immunity from bubonic plague (and some other diseases) is found in 14% of the direct descendants of Eyam plague survivors but in only 1% of the general population, so maybe the traditional diagnosis is correct.
