May 2022 in Palma Majorca

The colloquium will take place in parallel with other activities commemorating the last plague outbreak in Majorca (1820).

The geographical scope of the meeting is centered on the Mediterranean region where the second pandemic ended, with the last known plague epidemic erupting in Egypt in 1834. We are aware that a broad geographic approach is required to understand the survival of this disease (for thousands of years), and to map the ways in which it spread.

The chronological scope begins in Protohistoric times—since the bacterium has been identified in human skeletons dating back around 3,000 years—with the goal of improving our understanding of when and how the bacterium developed its pathogenic nature.