This article, Hunting for a Mass Killer in Medieval Graveyards , informs us that:
Modern [bubonic] plague is carried by fleas and spreads no faster than the rats that carry them can travel. [And this modern plague can be defeated by eliminating fleas and/or rats.] The Black Death seems to have spread directly from one person to another.
It also tells us that:
Victims sometimes emitted a deathly stench, which is not true of plague victims today. And the Black Death felled at least 30 percent of those it inflicted, whereas a modern plague in India that struck Bombay in 1904, before the advent of antibiotics, killed only 3 percent of its victims.
It’s easy to understand why scientists think it might be important to recover the DNA for that earlier plague from graveyards in London. They are motivated largely by a desire to protect us from a re-emergence of this other form of the bacterium — the only part of the DNA sequenced so far is identical to that of the modern bacterium, Yersinia pestis for those who wish to know the name of the little beast. Scientists might find it to be very likely that the horrible version of that bacterium would emerge by mutations in the wild or they might find it would be likely to happen under certain conditions or they might find it wouldn’t be likely.
So, let’s say the DNA for that horrible bacterium is sequenced. A vaccine and maybe other helpful medicines are developed. That could save many lives, even entire peoples, if a mutation in the wild brought back that earlier form of Yersinia pestis.
That’s the good side of the coin. Unfortunately, we live in an age where the citizenry — I speak of the United States — are gentle and submissive barbarians and they’re ruled by political machines which choose for them candidates for leadership positions who are a much worse sort of barbarian. With very few exceptions, the political leaders of the United States and several European countries, act as if under no significant moral constraints when it comes to unleashing death and destruction upon foreign countries.
If the full DNA for Yersinia pestis of the more dangerous sort is sequenced, we’d have the possibility of a truly dangerous biological weapon being developed by forcing a mutation of the modern and less dangerous form of the bacterium. It would then be available for use by these moral monsters who are the political leaders of the United States and many other countries. At this point, I have horrible visions in my head. I won’t try to so much as sketch out the scenes — check out Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year or any history book covering the 14th century.
What’s really bad is the simple fact that a scientific research project with good goals raises fears of this sort. How far the West has fallen from even the pretense of being either Christian or a civilization. We, through our increasingly evil leaders, can misuse even knowledge gained to understand God’s world and to protect human beings against a possibly great danger. We’ve proven capable of corrupting the most noble of ventures and then we return to the regularly scheduled program. And so much of what we do is irrational and unprofitable and seemingly done for no purpose other than the domestic political points to be gained by the politicians who can murder the greater number of innocent human beings in distant countries.