In this video, Joe Alton MD discusses a short history of something that’s been on our planet for billions of years: microbes! Of course, most microbes are perfectly harmless, but some can kill you. A few can cause worldwide pandemics, like Yersinia Pestis, the bacteria that caused the Black Plague. Yersinia lived on fleas that lived on rats that lived among humans, and still causes cases in various parts of the world (including a few in the U.S.). In order to understand disease-causing germs (also called pathogens), it’s useful to know where they came from, how we humans came to realize they … Continue reading A Short History of Germs