The Volga pox

Here is a mostly-good article about the history of past diseases.

Rinderpest / measles was pinpointed a few scant weeks ago, but I didn't see point in commenting on that since, about 500 BC is about what I'd assumed (wasn't Pericles' Plague, measles?). The article is also claiming that 2011(!) is when we finally proved that the Black Death was the same Yersinia as caused plagues in nineteenth-century India. I didn't even notice that "proof" in 2011 and, honestly, I'd have laughed it off if I had.

This new finding, on Variola, interests me more. They found some 'pox up in Viking Scandinavia that comes from a different lineage than the 'pox roaming around elsewhere up to 1980.

The 'pox against which I was vaccinated in the early 1970s comes from that famous western Mediterranean strain which did for the Americas. The Vikings had something else, something older - it must have broken from the main chain 300 AD.

The authors assume that it got to Scandinavia and hung around for five hundred years. Therefore, it must have been less virulent - more endemic and mild. I admit it helped that the Normans were (and are) a cow culture which offered some cowpox to inoculate the locals.

But I do question the conclusion. If the Norsepox was just some measle, how come it died out. How come it didn't spread wherever else the Vikings went.

I offer an alternative: this was a Volga plague, rampaging from Kazan in the old Bulgaria upstream the Caspian. In origin, it was a Sasanian and 'Abbâsî bug. Its separation from our west strain reflects Iranian and Islamic separation from the old Roman and Christian world. It died out in Iran because Iran itself was depopulated and depressed over the Two Silent Centuries. It died out in Bulgaria and Scandinavia because the populations were never high here.