This doesn't really answer its own question though. Using human feces as fertilizer is a plausible method of transmission, but if the monks were doing this, su

This doesn't really answer its own question though. Using human feces as fertilizer is a plausible method of transmission, but if the monks were doing this, surely the villagers were doing it too? Or is the difference that monks were communal and thus more likely to ingest each other's feces, while the, uhh, blast radius would be smaller for a single-family household?