Young says more crops mean more plague for Africa
Africa needs more food.
And to get more food, you need more farmland.
There's a relatively simple solution — it's called "land conversion," and it can mean creating new fields to grow crops next to fragments of forest.
Only there's a catch. The rats of the forest are drawn to the crops of the farmland — and to the grains that farmers often store outside their homes. And those rats can carry the bacteria that causes plague — the very same plague responsible for claiming millions of lives during the Middle Ages.
"Throughout East Africa there's been a lot of push toward land conversion," says Hillary Young, a community ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Young is particularly interested in some of the pests on this farmland: specifically, the rats that come to poach harvested crops. Recently, she completed a study showing that rats on farmland are more likely to carry the bacteria that cause plague than rats in the forest.