A New Model for Rat-Flea–Driven Plague Transmission

Rats have long been thought to drive plague epidemics, specifically bubonic plague. However in a PNAS publication (2018), an alternative theory for plague transmission has been posited by Dean et al., where ectoparasites living on human hosts drive spread. This talk will present a new mathematical model (developed with Ian Lynch and Luke Mattfeld) for the spread of the plague based on rat-flea interactions with the human population and compare our results to existing models. Our results suggest that rat-flea transmission of the plague is still plausible.