The Plague: How Did One Village Survive? | Riddle Of The Plague Survivors | Timeline

hello everyone and welcome to this documentary on

timeline

my name is dan snow and I want to tell you about the history hit tv is like netflix for history hundreds of exclusive documentaries and interviews with the best historians in the world we have an exclusive offer available for fans of the

timeline

, if you go to History Hit TV, you can follow the information below this video or just search on Google History Hit TV and use the code Timeline. You will get a special introductory offer, go and check it out in the meantime, enjoy this video throughout the process.

For centuries, one disease tormented people more than all others, the Black Death moved with deadly speed, leveling entire cities, destroying Europe and killing an incredible 25 million people. Contact with the deadly disease meant certain death, or so it was always believed until now in a remote English

village

. A strange story has emerged that has frustrated scientists and historians alike. Here people managed to resist the deadly

plague

against all odds. Why did these people

survive

when others died around them? Scientist Stephen O'Brien believes he may have solved the mystery. It's a little. It's a bit like a detective story, as you get closer and closer to solving it and discovering what the answer is, you get excited and more and more convinced that there is an answer and that you are going to get to it, and its incessant work detective has revealed the answer to another great medical enigma our chances of surviving the deadliest disease of the 21st century in the autumn of 1347 twelve Genoese galleys entered the port of Messina Sicily the ships contained a gruesome cargo corpses with a disgusting smell scattered around On the deck, the few who were still alive screamed in pain, begging God to forgive them their sins.

The ships received the order to leave the port, but it was too late. A deadly disease had escaped to the coast in just 12 months. It would have gutted the heart. of Europe eliminating a third Behind the deadly pestilence was an invisible culprit:

plague

bacteria carried by fleas lurking in the fur of rats. The deadly insect quickly spread to man. Where the rats went. So did the disease along Europe's trade routes. The Black Death spread relentlessly northward. In January I was in Marseille 60 percent of the population died In the spring I was in Florence 75 died Then I arrived in Paris Travel stories came back and letters came back about this terrible cataclysmic disease that was decimating or decimating that was cutting swaths through the populations of other nations elsewhere, so there was a sense that England, for example, could see it coming towards them in September 1348, the first deadly cargo of disease arrived in England and docked at Southampton, it quickly spread to London and soon the dreadful signs of the plague broke out.

Throughout the city, a sky-high fever was followed by an outbreak of agonizing black oils in the armpits, neck and groin, giving the disease its name of the black death. If the infection reached the lungs, it became a mnemonic plague that made it possible for the disease to pass from one person to another. to the person through breath the victim was hopeless death was inevitable today the no less deadly bacteria dr rick titball in porton down can only handle the plague in a specially constructed isolation unit the plague bacteria is undoubtedly one of the most dangerous bacteria we can I know and often within two or three days, people exposed have died from pneumonic plague and the other problem is that it carries a very high mortality rate, it's almost 100 percent , almost everyone who contracts the mnemonic plague will die.

The plague was so infectious and so deadly that medieval England saw it as a punishment from God, but prayer and penance were useless. The plague raged without mercy. I think it's very difficult for us to understand what it meant for 60 to 75 percent of a locality to die as medicine in the Middle Ages. and the rebirth was rudimentary, there were no cures for diseases, there were only attempts to protect oneself from diseases, so the fear of the plague is an absolute fear, if you contract it you will die, the plague would continue its deadly visits intermittently for the next 300 years. years before mysteriously disappearing again at the height of the epidemic in England, a strategy was devised to try to limit the spread of the disease.

Quarantine, they would lock you in for 40 days with the rest of your family. The guards would make sure you didn't escape. the padlocks were closed and if you needed it you were provided with nurses to attend to your care and offer you what was necessary for human life and this meant that the sick and the healthy were sometimes locked up in deeply fetid circumstances for a long time, it was effectively a sentence of death after 40 days of exposure to the deadly pestilence no one was expected to come out alive but what was the fate of those people locked in their plague-ravaged homes?

Plague historian Justin Champion found clues buried in London archives that convinced him there had in fact been

survivors

. He compared plague records with burial records to see how many people had actually died from the plague in Every home their findings marked a turning point in plague research throughout London found pockets of resistance. What is intriguing is Clearly, many more people contracted the disease than died. The images of London with a standing grass growing between cobbles show that there is widespread disease, if not widespread mortality immediately, so we have the imponderable problem of many people contracting the disease and a high proportion of them dying, but also people who

survive

d having experienced that disease, if some individuals had survived the quarantine, which made them so special that they were able to resist the most infectious and deadly disease in the world.

Scientist Dr. Stephen O'Brien was determined to find out as head of the laboratory. at the national institute of health in washington o'brien had dedicated himself to answering a question why some people were able to resist infectious diseases while others succumbed the mystery of the black plague was the ultimate challenge i think all scientists like it make important discoveries and would like to learn new things, but I think the ones who really make the most critical advances are the ones who can't stand not understanding what happened so they can investigate the mystery of the plague

survivors

that Stephen O'Brien needed to find. a plague-stricken area where there were documented cases of people surviving quarantine O'brien finally found what he was looking for eem

village

in derbyshire eem had a unique and extraordinary story behind it which made it the perfect place for o'brien studied hidden in the Peak District, far from England's main trade routes, eem might have escaped the plague had it not been for a bundle of cloth.

In September 1665, when the plague had returned to London with a vengeance, a package that was for the town tailor, george vickers. and contained fabric from a London warehouse. Little did I know as he hung the damp cloth to dry, that the jumping fleas were carrying deadly bacteria plagued as he prepared it for placement. He's probably shaken and vickers, the man who did the job uh was bitten and red marks appeared on his hands and he didn't realize it and no one would have told him in those days that the red marks on his wrists were fatal and that soon time would be dead it wasn't long before other deaths followed and the villagers realized their fate, the plague had arrived, the death toll began to increase because there is no medical help in the village, there is no apothecary, there is no nursing assistance, people were totally baffled and of course the only person they could really turn to was their rector and asked for help.

The village rector was William Mompesson. He once saw that Eem was doomed, but there was still a chance to prevent the plague from spreading to neighboring areas. He ordered an immediate quarantine. No one was allowed to enter or leave the town and when they heard this for the first time the shock must have been terrible because they immediately realized that if they accepted the quarantine they would isolate themselves if they did not die of the plague they would probably die of hunger now, this was solved by Devonshire Of course we lived at Chatsworth House, just a few miles away, and he agreed to provide as much food as possible.

It became one of the most dramatic stories of the plague years. The food was given to a In a desolate place on the edge of the village marked by a stone in the hope that by isolating the surrounding villages they would be saved, the doomed villagers left the coins they had washed in vinegar to pay for it and the irony of this is that of course some of these poor souls who died died with more food in their stomach than they had ever had in the so called happier times, the weeks passed and then the months, it was assumed that eventually everyone in eem would die in September 1666, a year after the plague had come to bite.

The first strangers dared to venture into the town. What would they find after a year of horror? To their amazement, they were greeted by survivors. They were told extraordinary stories of miraculous recovery that have become part of the town's folklore. Joan Plant is descended from one of those survivors. She was. She grew up feeling that her village was special, she met Stephen O'Brien and told him the history of the village. One tale tells of the village gravedigger who, in his haste to bury the dead, dragged a plague-stricken man out of his bed while he was still Warm, presumably he didn't know the difference between unconscious and dead, I don't know, but he dragged this talk down the stairs and halfway down the stairs this guy revived and when he got to the bottom he asked for a drink um and supposedly you know he was fine and survives even more notable was the case of jones's ancestor, margaret blackwell, in the final stages of illness, Margaret staggered into the kitchen overcome with a desperate thirst a few hours after her brother Francis had given her up for dead, she was quite delirious and didn't know where she was, she saw this jug of milk on the table and simply drank this with what she thought was milk and it was bacon grease and she survived the play, she was a survivor and that's a whole story in itself that maybe the bacon grease cured him, I don't know, but that's one of the stories of these tall tales or historical facts about how many people actually survived the plague in Eem.

Local historian John Clifford was determined to find out, so we put it to the test and analyzed the parish register starting in 1630 and listed everyone who seemed to be alive in 1665. We eliminated those who died in the plague and then searched the I record evidence of survivors and we go until 1725, which was 60 years. After the plague and we found evidence of people marrying people who had a harder time dying and we picked out 433 um survivors, this staggering number meant that even though they had been trapped in the deadly pestilence for over a year, the half of eem's village had retreated.

As scientists struggled to make sense of it, so many villagers survived that some have wondered if it was actually the plague that struck Eem in 1665. Could the black swords and raging thirst of the victims have had another sinister explanation in the eem village in derbyshire stories? For centuries stories have been told about the extraordinary resistance people had to the world's deadliest disease plague, but now there were question marks: could it have been some other, less virulent disease that struck this quiet rural community in 1665? There was one disease that showed remarkably similar symptoms to plague anthrax. Anthrax expert Tony Hart believes the two could have easily been confused.

Anthrax is an infection that is transmitted from animals to humans. It then produces a red bump that is very itchy and that red bump then turns into blisters and the blisters. they fuse together to produce an ulcer and then on top of it there is a black scab, therefore anthrax means black. Could it have been not fleas but anthrax spores that were delivered to the village tailor, George Vickers, in the bundle of cloth? Could the villagers have confused the two? Anthrax could have spread rapidly on Derbyshire farms - unlike the plague, anthrax blisters are rarely fatal to humans.

If it had been anthrax that had affected them, then the mystery of the high survival rate would be solved. There was only one way to test it. Anthrax was deadly to sheep and cows, so they would have been wiped out. John Clifford reviewed the village records to see if any animals had survived. You will find people who leave wills in which theyThey refer to the way they want to dispose of their livestock and then if you look at their inventories that were taken after the plague, you will find that they are listing considerable holdings of agricultural livestock.

If it was anthrax, the first victims would have been cattle with no evidence of dead cattle. The anthrax theory had to be Dismissed the accounts of black swellings on the body, the fever and the raging thirst of the victims left no room for further doubt. It could only have been a plague that struck Eem in 1665. In London it was assumed that the squalor and overcrowding of the city's streets played a role in the high death rate, could the death rate in the countryside, where living conditions were not so dense? Justin Champion has studied London plague records to see if the crowded living conditions of the poor made it more likely. to succumb to the plague that their wealthier neighbors, we did so by using various computer techniques, relational databases linking tax records that gave us a fairly accurate description of the wealth of individual households across London and linking them with the burial records so that we could, if you like plot the incidence of death both in terms of social status but also in terms of space across London, so in a sense we were mapping death, the results showed that poverty, poor hygiene and overcrowding were irrelevant.

Death struck everyone equally in Eem's rural location. enA comparatively spacious life is unlikely to have stopped the spread of the plague, so what could explain the survival rate in eem records showed not only cases of strange recovery? Some people never became sick at all despite constant exposure to plague bacteria. One of those cases was Elizabeth. hancock the hancocks lived on the outskirts of the village and had managed to escape the infection for some months, then in august 1666 the revealing boyles appeared in the young hancock boy john, within a few days his sister alice contracted the disease until the that their mother Elizabeth took care of them.

In vain, one by one, Elizabeth dragged the bodies of her children to the burial site on the hill behind her house. In total she buried six of her children and her husband in the space of a week. The graves of Elizabeth's children are still on the hillside outside. Eem yet. Despite her daily contact with the infectious insect, Elizabeth herself never contracted the plague. Even more extraordinary was the story of Marshall Howe Howe was an opportunist, he appointed himself the village gravedigger and visited the homes of the dying using whatever valuables he could find. loading corpses into his car, Howe handled literally hundreds of infected corpses, but he survived the plague, why did some people contract the disease and others, without looking at those groups of death, survive that environment?

And I think ultimately we have an imponderable question of whether our data throws up why some survived and ultimately I think we would be forced to say that there was something biologically different about those groups that survived. Stephen O'Brien was curious to find out if there really was something biologically different about these people than what he had. Come and find out that one of the things that is very common when studying infectious diseases in large populations is that different people have different outcomes, not everyone gets sick or not everyone dies and each disease is a little different and the explanation for that is often assumed.

That is a nutrition, an environment or a native immunity, but today we are beginning to discover that more and more differences in response, particularly to infectious diseases, have to do with the genes that individuals carry with them. The hunch was that the eem survivors could have been protected by their genetic makeup if they had them, these genes could have been passed down from generation to generation in the eem graveyard, the descendants of the plague survivors lie buried, same names they arise again and again the hancocks the ovens the blackwells most of the time i sit at a desk joan plant showed stephen o'brien the tombs that linked his family to the plague years my maiden name is harley and my mother's name was furness so my ancestors are the furnace family and they are around here this is one of my ancestors these are your great-grandparents that's right, there is the grave of Hancock Elizabeth Hancock and her husband Albert and here are my direct ancestors George Furnish and his wife Emma and I am a descendant of the Furnish family, my mother was a Furnish and my grandparents, yes they are both from my family.

Well, the population is a fascinating opportunity to really see what a natural history experiment is to understand the interaction between pest and genetic resistance. Virtually everyone was exposed to the plague bacillus and a very high fraction of them died as a result. The few survivors who emerged later intermarried and left a legacy, if you will, of descendants and by looking at their genes we wonder if we can discover it. The gene that caused resistance to that plague, the large number of descendants still living in EEM, was gold dust for O'Brien, but to test his genetic theory he would first have to persuade the villagers to participate in an extraordinary experiment.

The people of the village of Eem in Derbyshire had baffled historians and scientists by its astonishing resistance to the plague in 1665. Geneticist Stephen O'Brien decided to put the village under the microscope to discover if the answer to this mystery could be found in the genes . of their descendants, the villagers were asked to swab the inside of their cheeks to obtain a DNA sample that could be analyzed to see if there was any evidence of protective genes. There was one gene that O'Brien had hope for: it was a mutant member. of a family of genes that plays a key role in defending the body against disease was called delta 32 o'brien wanted to test it to see if it could protect against the plague eem is a wonderful opportunity to do it because it is like a photocopy machine its frequencies Genetic mutations have been replicated for several generations without much infusion from the outside, so we can look at the descendants of bubonic plague survivors and simply wonder whether or not this uh delta 32 mutation occurs at a remarkably high frequency in DNA.

Samples collected at eem were sent to University College London for processing. If no gene was present, O'Brien's theory would be blown out of the water, but if it did appear it would open the door to an extraordinary new avenue of research: the possibility that genes protected some people from the plague the samples were analyzed by a London team headed by Dr. David Goldstein let's imagine that, in fact, the delta 32 mutation confers some resistance to the plague, we know that the plague hit eem very hard if we now have descendants available from that population, so if the delta 32 mutation conferred resistance to the plague then the descendants of this village should be enriched for that mutation because those individuals who had the mutation would be the ones who would have survived the eem experiment could only work if the villagers could prove that they were direct descendants of plague survivors.

O'Brien met with them to take a good look at their family trees. What we are curious about is to see if the record of survivors of the plague the plague has been passed on in your genes joan, your origin goes back here to the blackwells this is me here I am mom and dad goes back through the barber family yes to the blackwells all the way and thomas barber married hannah blackwell to robert blackwell and ruth sellers and all the way back to plague survivors francis blackwell and margaret blackwell blackwell's remarkable recovery from the plague was attributed for centuries to the consumption of bacon grease, but was there a more scientific explanation?

John Hancock is a direct descendant of Elizabeth Hancock, whose husband and six of her children were victims of the plague; no explanation has ever been given as to why she alone managed to escape. Could it have been genetic resistance? Yes it was a gene that protected the people of Eem from the plague. plague, how could he avoid such a deadly disease? The doctor. Rick Titball has been trying to find the answer to that question by exploring the way plague bacteria attack cells in the human body. We know that for many disease-causing microorganisms there is a very specific form. interaction between the microorganism and the host a gateway that allows the microorganism to enter the host cells when plague bacteria enter the blood, the body sends an army of white blood cells to destroy them, but the plague outwits the immune system and gets into the white blood. cells the same cells sent to kill you and hijacks them for your own purposes uses them to travel to the lymph nodes the center of the body's defense network here bursts and attacks the immune system giving the victim little chance of survival Was this shot of immune system control that made the plague so uniquely destructive?

The theory was that a gene like delta 32 could block the crucial gateway to human cells, thus preventing plague bacteria from entering the body three weeks after samples were collected at the same location. The first results were that there is clear evidence of delta 32. So these are the traces of eam that you have here and they are 190. So how this works is that we focus on a particular part of the gene and here you see an individual with two copies of the delta 32 mutation in total, the gene was present in 14 of eem's offspring, o'brien's hunch had borne fruit, the delta 32 gene was clearly visible in eem, but what was the meaning of 14 and was it a legacy of the plague the only way to find out was to compare the team's results with other areas o'brien assembled an international team of scientists to map the levels of the gene around the world as the results began to filter into an extraordinary picture that emerged.

According to data from Africa, South America and the Far East, there was no delta 32. O'Brien felt he was on to something big. When you find a trail, you smell it like a bloodhound and as you get closer and closer, I can almost taste the answer that's coming out and when we started to unravel the secrets behind delta 32 we became convinced that there was an answer and I really wanted to. be the person who was there when we found out what happened by completing his worldwide search for the gene. O'brien made an exciting discovery: the levels of the gene found in eem were only matched in other parts of europe along the roots of the black death, such as delta 32, they are basically genetic errors that disappear unless they give the people a huge advantage in survival so the gene levels were as high as they were throughout Europe, that advantage must have been surprising, since we were absolutely convinced that delta 32 was extremely unusual, that it had increased in European ancestors to a very high frequency very quickly and that The only explanation that fit all the data was some kind of infectious disease outbreak that could have killed millions of people throughout the area where this event was taking place.

O'Brien was now convinced that the infectious disease outbreak was the Black Death. delta 32 coincided exactly with the spread of the plague, but one more piece of the puzzle remained the date, whether o'brien and goldstein could pinpoint the exact date when the gene erupted so dramatically in europe that they could confirm If it was caused by the plague extremely high, the work took months while they came up with a mathematical formula, so I think we could get an age estimate if we look at nearby markers and essentially see the nature of the association between the mutation and the variation in nearby.

It will work, I'm just a little worried about the variation, but on the other hand, that will give us information, yes, that's absolutely true, it will have a connection to time, the basics, uh o'brien and goldstein. They analyzed the samples from the O'Brien global effects database and were able, by observing small differences between the genes, to calculate the date of the original mutation. They discovered that the gene exploded in the European population about 700 years ago, right around the time of the Black Death. arrived in Europe the puzzle was complete the date was correct the mystery of those who had left their plague-ravaged homes now had an explanation all the signs pointed to the delta 32 mutant gene to explain the mysterious mechanism that blocked the entry of the plague plague bacteria from entering the human cell, but there was an additional enigma, many in eem had totally resisted the plague, but if the gene blocked the plague bacteria, then why did some people get sick just to achievea notable recovery?

There was an intriguing explanation that Elizabeth Hancock had never contracted the plague even though she was constantly exposed to infections to completely block the deadly bacteria, she must have had two copies of the protective gene, one inherited from each of her parents, but what happened to people who had only inherited one copy of the gene? Margaret Blackwell actually contracted the plague but recovered, could it be that she only had one copy of delta 32, allowing her to fight off and get rid of the disease?, may it be that individuals with one copy of delta 32 actually postpone the onset of death and, meanwhile, the weaponry of the immune system, which has many different battalions, so to speak, could be mounting an immune response sufficient to eliminate the uh of the bacteria so that the individual actually survives rather than dies. .

The evidence was now overwhelming that this small genetic mistake called delta 32 protected generations of families from the plague, but there was going to be an even more extraordinary twist in the story of delta 32. What life-saving legacy did these European survivors pass on to his descendants? All the evidence showed that a rogue gene protected many of our European ancestors from the world's deadliest disease plague, if so, then the survivors would have passed on a unique disease-fighting ability to their bloodline. Could this gene help us fight new infections? There was a disease in which scientists were beginning to see chilling parallels. with the black plague, the modern scourge of AIDS, san francisco 1980, more gay people than ever took to the streets to celebrate their lifestyle, people were no longer ashamed of being gay, it was a moment of euphoria among the crowd, It was Steve Crone, there were more gay people, there were more people because it was the baby boom generation and we had more opportunities to express ourselves.

Some of it was very much a sexual expression, so in that sense it was domestic, we had music, we had disco. We had drugs and we could dance all night and all day, but doctors had already seen signs of a mysterious and shocking new disease that was affecting gay men. Dark purple spots appeared on the skin. The lymph nodes swollen. Something sinister had arrived. Steve Crone didn't realize there was an imminent threat to him and his circle of friends. The quiet California afternoons didn't have to be disturbed by some dark illness. Then his lover, Jerry, got sick.

No one knew what it was. It was an emotional nightmare because he was sick for so long. 15 months and there was never a diagnosis, then there was someone who went blind, who lost 30 pounds in weight, who had cytomegalovirus in his liver, who underwent all kinds of horrible tests, so there was a mystery that suddenly this person went from being 34 years old and totally vital, a gymnast, handsome and healthy, and suddenly it was like living with an 85 year old man. You continue to maintain this positive image of them as a healthy person until you finally turn a corner and to be honest, I was actually an astrologer. whoever told me I was going to die was never a doctor jerry died on march 4, 1982 he was the fifth person in america to die from what would be known as gay AIDS san francisco he continued partying happily without knowing that the disease was spreading through a The virus's lethal witch watched in horror as it spread relentlessly through her circle of friends.

You can't really process that many people dying all the time, so if you go to a funeral you know if someone dies every month or every year there. Maybe I would have lost over the course of that decade, I lost between 70 and 80 people, so you're talking about a lot of funerals and a lot of memorials and there really was no one left in the last two decades, there's been 18 million. AIDS deaths around the world the culprit the HIV virus has become the biggest killer in the Western world since the Black Death like the plague AIDS devastated the immune system but like the plague there was a mystery some people seemed more Brien was fascinated by the parallels in comparing the two diseases.

O'Brien discovered that the HIV virus was tricking the immune system just like the plague; It targeted the exact same white blood cells, the same cells sent to destroy and sequester them once inside the cell. The virus could completely eliminate the body's immune response. The bacteria that cause plague specifically target the same cells that HIV enters, so those connections are indirect, but they are very similar to finding two very similar types of murders. occurring in a very small town in pennsylvania at the same time and us wondering whether or not the same person committed the murder, the murder mystery might have remained unsolved if it weren't for steve crone, stunned by the loss of his lover and all of his close friends, crone had assumed that was the case.

It would only be a matter of time before he himself developed the disease. His lifestyle had been no different from theirs. Why should it be special? The only other experience you could find where all your friends your own age are dying around you would be if you were in war and your platoon was wiped out. The idea was that he would eventually contract AIDS and die, but surprisingly, Krone did not receive AIDS. Test after test showed the same negative result for HIV. I was mentioning this question about how I was with a family. relative at a party and they said well, why don't they test you, then they study other children, when you find out that everyone in the family has a disease and this child doesn't get the disease, why do they study that child, why not They were doing that with you and I thought, look, that sounds like it makes sense, why aren't they studying me?

That inspired me to make another round of phone calls to doctors and see if there were any trials out there and there weren't. I really worked a lot on the phone, there was no trial because there are numbers you can call for HIV testing, there was no one studying HIV negative men and until I found Bill Paxton, Young became active and decided to make his mark on the history of AIDS, Paxton. He persuaded his lab chief at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York to let him try a new experiment. His idea was to test the blood of people who were at very high risk for HIV but had never contracted the disease to see if he could provide any information. clues to how the virus worked i was looking for blood from people like steve the center didn't have any studies of people who were exposed to hiv but had remained negative while in new york did you know those people were there i mean did you know those people that paxton took a sample of crohn's blood and bombarded it with the hiv virus three thousand times the normal amount of hiv needed to infect a cell something amazing happened despite the massive dose of hiv steve's cells were not infected the red colors in The well indicates the amount of viral activity and as you see, when you cross here, these individuals have a viral production and then it reaches Steve's cells, there are white blood cells, when you see that there is no red, those wells remain white, which suggests that there is no viral replication that Paxton assumed there had been.

A mistake, we thought maybe we had infected the culture with bacteria for good, so we went back to Steve, but again it was the same result. We came back again, same result, something was blocking the virus from entering Steve's cells, but what if Paxton could find it? discovered that it would have solved the biggest mystery of AIDS why some people were resistant to the disease by looking at DNA paxton instantly saw something surprising unlike people who were infected with hiv steve's cells had a blocking mechanism the virus simply It could not enter the cell. Additional tests confirmed that this was caused by a mutant gene, it was delta 32.

There was now a solid explanation for the fact that the old woman had never contracted HIV. It wasn't just luck, it was the delta 32 mutant gene that had been passed on to him. because of his European ancestors I took it in a very cautious way, but it was also very exciting to be able to tell my family that I may never be able to get AIDS, that was the first reaction that I think I can really say for myself. to my nieces and nephews and my sisters who wouldn't have to go through what I saw so many other families go through, I think that was the biggest advantage.

O'Brien quickly took over, analyzed his own database of delta 32 and found the results that surprised the scientific community. All people with a copy of Delta 32. A fifth of the population showed a delay in developing AIDS if they were infected with HIV, but data show that one percent of people in Britain and the United States, almost three million. people have two copies of the gene like steve crone, giving them virtually total resistance to aids and the explanation was actually quite simple: these people did not have the portal of entry for hiv to enter and therefore even if They were exposed over and over again, they didn't have it.

They became infected and this was the first genetic restriction that was discovered against an infectious disease in humans and was a great discovery in unraveling the mystery of the plague survivors. O'brien had solved an even greater

riddle

: it was clear that the survivors of plague-stricken Europe had left an impressive legacy to their descendants: protection against the most feared killer of our time, AIDS, an understanding of the role of delta 32 and the protection of the body against the AIDS virus has opened a new avenue of research for the development of possible preventive measures. Cures O'Brien's genetic detective work had paid off.