Dangers of Noncritical Use of Historical Plague Data

Abstract

Researchers have published several articles using historical data sets on plague epidemics using impressive digital databases that contain thousands of recorded outbreaks across Europe over the past several centuries. Through the digitization of preexisting data sets, scholars have unprecedented access to the historical record of plague occurrences. However, although these databases offer new research opportunities, noncritical use and reproduction of preexisting data sets can also limit our understanding of how infectious diseases evolved. Many scholars have performed investigations using Jean-Noël Biraben’s data, which contains information on mentions of plague from various kinds of sources, many of which were not cited. When scholars fail to apply source criticism or do not reflect on the content of the data they use, the reliability of their results becomes highly questionable. Researchers using these databases going forward need to verify and restrict content spatially and temporally, and historians should be encouraged to compile the work.

Phylogeography of the second plague pandemic revealed through analysis of historical Yersinia pestis genomes

“…Although certain key regions in western Eurasia remain under-sampled for ancient Y. pestis DNA, namely the eastern Mediterranean, Scandinavia and the Baltics, vast amounts of high-quality genomic data are becoming increasingly available. Their integration into disease modelling efforts, which consider vector transmission dynamics 62,63 , climatic 12,64,65 and epidemiological data 66 , as well as a critical re-evaluation of historical records 67 , will become increasingly important for better understanding the second plague pandemic.…”

Living with plague: Lessons from the Soviet Union’s antiplague system

“…However, this does not generally apply to regionally curated data: The KSCQZD and Kazakh antiplague stations hold decades of continuous plague surveillance data collected by trained and dedicated scientists and specialists (74, 75). Using the Soviet-era data most productively today requires that they also be subject to scholarly historical analysis (76), including documentary investigation into the external social, cultural, and political factors influencing scientific work in a given place and time; semistructured or open interviews of participants (or their successors); full integration of both ecological/biological and human social data for a given dataset; notation of problems with datasets; and close collaboration with scientists using these datasets. Historical analysis is key to analyzing change over time in disease patterns and responses.…”

Longer-Run Economic Consequences of Pandemics

“…Total number of battle deaths are divided by duration of the battle (in years) to obtain an annual series of battle deaths. Since battles lasted more than a year, sometimes more than a decade, we think 20,000 deaths per year is comparable to the pandemic death toll threshold of 100,000 we employ.6 Readers interested in the debate on severity of pre-19th century epidemics may refer to Alfani and Murphy (2017),Roosen and Curtis (2018), andBiraben (1975), among others.7 Wars often last for several years. We focus on war-year pairs with 20,000 casualties or more.…”