What was english sweating sickness

This virus is transmitted by certain mice, rats, and voles, which never show signs of illness, and humans become infected by inhaling aerosolized rodent urine or faeces. Aside from a outbreak in Argentina, there are no cases of hantavirus transmitting person-to-person.

The clinical manifestations of the Sweat are hauntingly similar to hantavirus pulmonary syndrome HPS. The infamous outbreak in at the Four Corners region of the US killed 10 out of 23 victims. No treatment exists aside from mechanical ventilation. Imagining the Sweat as a New World hantavirus that was transported back to England may be tempting, but Heyman says that would mean the first outbreak would have taken place after the Americas were discovered in HPS also does not involve extreme sweating, casting doubt on whether it was responsible for the Sweat, although it is conceivable that a novel hantavirus with HPS-like and sweating symptoms evolved in Medieval Europe.

Another potential culprit is anthrax, according to microbiologist Edward McSweegan, which is caused by the bacterium Bacillus anthracis. The symptoms in the 22 cases of inhalation anthrax during the bioterrorism attacks of , which resulted in five deaths, include copious sweating, exhaustion, and sudden onset.

Anthrax is more common among animals; there is currently an outbreak among cattle in Peshawar, Pakistan, with 14 bulls dead by the end of March. To become infected, the bacterial spores must enter the body, so it cannot transmit between people, only by inhaling or ingesting spores, or getting spores in an open wound.

Each of these methods causes slightly different symptoms. The last version, cutaneous anthrax, involves skin lesions, but lesions are not common in the other two forms. McSweegan says the English sweating sickness could have been contracted from anthrax spores in wool, although he admits that inhalation anthrax was likely rare prior to industrialized wool production. Why did English sweating sickness occur in random summers? That the disease was neither plague nor typhus was clear from contemporary accounts.

Its victims bore neither the boils typical of plague nor the rash of typhus. Sudor Anglicus, they say, may have been an early version of a disease that has made headlines in recent years: hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, which erupted in the Four Corners region of the American Southwest in the summer of The similarities between the two are striking, says Gant.

Second, sweating sickness left its victims breathless. Hanta also leaves people gasping, filling their lungs with fluid. Finally, the sweating sickness typically killed robust adults, just as hanta does. Most flu viruses, on the other hand, strike hardest at the elderly. Gant and Thwaites say they could conceivably test their hypothesis.

Henry Brandon, duke of Suffolk, who succumbed during the epidemic of , was buried in a cemetery that still exists. Other candidate pathogens have generated other explanations and scenarios. Sweating sickness had disappeared by late Elizabethan times.

Its reign of terror barely lasted a century. If indeed it was an ancient variant of HPS, we can perhaps speculate about what led to its demise. The virus may have mutated to a less virulent form, perhaps in the process acquiring the capacity to be passed between humans as a more benign feverish illness, rather than being just a sporadic environmental hazard. Or perhaps its evolutionary trajectory took it in the other direction, becoming more fatal to its rodent hosts, thereby reducing the quantity of infected droppings around human habitations.

There is a third possibility — we know that the climate of Europe was becoming progressively colder from the late middle ages onwards. Perhaps some subtle change in rodent ecology made life harder for the virus. Much of the mystery of sweating sickness remains. However, we do know that hantaviruses are still with us, and their day could come again. Festival of Social Science — Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire.

Edition: Available editions United Kingdom. Become an author Sign up as a reader Sign in. Derek Gatherer , Lancaster University. Sudor Anglicus Contemporary accounts describe an illness that began with a general feeling that something was not right, a strange premonition of oncoming horror, followed by the onset of violent headache, flu-like shivers and aching limbs.