A team of scientists from Norway and Switzerland are challenging the widely held view that communities of rats in Europe played host to the fleas carrying the disease for hundreds of years.
In an article published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers say they think the plague bacteria could have sprung from populations of the great gerbil and other rodent species in Central Asia.
“If we’re right, we’ll have to rewrite that part of history,” Professor Nils Christian Stenseth of the University of Oslo, one of the authors of the study, told the BBC.
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And for people suddenly worried about their pet gerbil, there’s no cause for alarm.
“If you get your gerbil at a pet store … you have nothing to worry about,” Ken Gage, a plague expert for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told NPR.
