Wikipedia says: "in the United States, infections occasionally occur in rural areas, where the bacteria are believed to circulate among rodents." A few years ago a boy in Russia contracted the plague after interacting with a wild marmot, he was treated successfully without any problems. I think this news is overblown, because everyone immediately pictures 14th century Europe
I saw a post about this on Reddit this morning. Haven't looked into it further, but people were claiming that there are versions of this plague that have been modified to release other toxins. It's effectively a bioweapon: they cure you for the plague, which kills you with the poison it contained.
There are some that had been modified to release endorphins!
>"When we first heard Soviet scientists were inserting the endorphin gene [for euphoria] into plague," says Dr. Henry Heine, a former U.S. Army bacteriologist, "we were appalled. That they would purposefully engineer the Y. pestis bacteria to behave this way... to make you want to go out and socialize... this was some horrifying stuff."
> . . .
> Former assistant secretary of defense Andy Weber agrees. "I grew up thinking Reagan’s phrase ‘Evil Empire’ was an exaggeration," he tells us. "Then I learned what the Russians were doing [with biological warfare]." He pauses for effect. "It was evil."
The accounts are from Annie Jacobsen's notes in "Biological War".
Indeed. I wonder how much work it would be to make this antibiotic resistant. Then the Russians develop some bacteriophage that infects and kills the bacteria as their own cure.
People just dramatically updated their priors since Covid. We went from pandemics are a problem of previous centuries to any new outbreak might be a pandemic.
The world is far more connected logistically before. Yes, we have modern medicine, but many people reject it. So, the priors-updating was probably both overdue, but maybe also overblown.
I think you can safely agree that they are not mutually exclusive and both of them are problems. In this particular case, it was a 100% fatality disease in a gain-of-function lab. It is being handled extremely seriously by Russia.
Perhaps the Russian military is overreacting with the blanket quarantines, but the odds are more likely that they understand the nature better than anyone else.
Again, normal pneumonic plague approaches 100% fatality rates. This is potentially a weaponized form.
Don't forget that what passes for a white house in the USA lately is ripping the copper out of the walls of our health and human services departments at incredible pace to give more tax cuts to billionaires
There are three ways the plague manifests: bubonic (Black Death, highly treatable), pneumonic (what this researcher died of) and systemic (gets in your blood–super nasty, but also doesn't spread easily).
Pneumonic is the most transmissible. That's why this is worth paying attention to. Not reacting to in any manner. But keeping a close eye on. Russia being Russia we'll probably only learn if containment was lost from Mongolia or China.
> Former head of the national public health agency Rospotrebnadzor stated that the disease the researcher died of is "most likely not the plague, but even if confirmed, there will be no spread of this disease
I also think it's overblown. My fear is that this is a special form of the disease, modified by Russian researchers for who knows what reasons, and may therefore be a problem.
My fear is that this is an enhanced virus that was being subjected to gain of function research, making it potentially much more dangerous than bog standard plague.
Similar to the cruise-ship Hantavirus situation earlier this year. People see a disease they've never encountered and assume it's a novel pandemic. Really, it's just one of the rare cases where a westerner contracts a disease that's endemic to the global poor.
Most of people who are alive can relate to a very specific period in their lives, and it’s easy to imagine now what virus can do in terms of social life.
Are you discounting rural Americans as not being part of the global poor then? Or not real “westerners”? There have been roughly 30 cases a year in western states since the disease was first found here in the 90s
The particular bacterium if infecting the skin is fairly treatable and mild with modern medicine, pneumonic plague is 100% lethal if not treated within 24h and utterly asymptomatic during the first 24h, it’s also airborne. Same bacterium but very different diseases..
I think a lot of people don't realize the Black Plague is bacterial and we already have a cure for it. Most people getting anxious probably assume its like Covid and a cure would have to be developed.
I think it's pretty apparent from the news articles about it. She died of pneumonic plague, which is a fast-moving form of Yersinia Pestis infection that is roughly 100% fatal if first treatment occurs > 24 hours after symptoms start.
Why pneumonic plague? Pneumonic plague is the form of infection that occurs when plague bacteria are inhaled in aerosolized form into the lungs, or when septicemic plague (plague in the bloodstreams) reaches the lungs. Like, for example, when a test tube breaks. Her method of infection was a pretty textbook vector for pneumonic plague. Other cases have been caused when tissue samples of infected rodents have been splayed open, for example, or when blood from an infected person splatters the respiratory tract. Plague bacteria spreads pretty poorly otherwise, which is why the main vector for bubonic plague is flea bites.
If it's the pneumonia style (i.e. the infection is in the lungs, not the lymph nodes) you have to start antibiotics very quickly or it's basically 100% fatal. So it's treatable, but only to a point. The good news is basic masks and quarantine are extremely effective, so the risk of outright spread beyond the initial patients and very early health care workers is very small.
there is not information that's exactly the same bacteria and that drugs work. It might be novel one or modified in the lab. Even for flu we don't have general vaccine that works.
Yes, the fact that is the plague is less worrying than it is plague from a bio research lab that escaped. The only unfounded, non verified news i have read is that it can from collecting of samples, not post experimenting. But your guess is as good as mine at this point
Prairie dogs are the main carriers in the US, and yet some people still want to give them protections because they are “cute”. They are literal vermin. Colorado is attempting to put a bag limit on hunting them, which is ridiculous given nobody is bagging their prairie dog kills. Because again, they are vermin.
They also destroy farmland and dig holes that cause hoofed animals to break their legs. The population got way out of control when their predators were mostly driven off by humans. And again, they spread bubonic plague. They are about as ecologically important as mosquitos. I understand the Venn diagram of HN users and people who grew up rural is infinitesimally small, but they are well known nuisance animals.
Come on, coyotes are classified as a least endangered animal and for good reason; they breed like crazy and eat almost anything. They are also a massive nuisance to livestock, a minor danger to people and they'll eat your cat or dog given half a chance. Culling prairie dogs would just mean their population would be slightly less booming.
Damn, I'm worried whether Russia’s response will prioritise containing the pathogen or containing the embarrassment. You can’t patch a public-health incident with a press release.
Most likely both. Just recently Russia had already contained the embarrassment of announcing there was a foot-and-mouth disease in cattle (so they don’t have to declare even a sporadic outbreak), but they also eradicated all the cattle to both contain and cover it up. Most likely, the same thing - containing, but under a different (less unsavory-sounding) pretense.
I suspect it will be similar to the current American regime's past handling of COVID: a lot of skilled people wanting to do the right thing, but having to fight an unnecessary uphill battle against the administration that was more interested in perception, economics, and politics than lives.
I'm not sure the public health establishment didn't do more harm than good during COVID, especially with all the politically expedient flip-flopping on masking: First claiming it was unnecessary as a white lie to protect supplies for front-line workers, then promoting cloth masks despite evidence not being able to establish it statistically significantly slows spread, and then insisting on masking children in their formative years who had already been vaccinated or otherwise gained natural protection against COVID.
Remember all the theater around wearing your mask to your restaurant table and then taking it off for your entire meal in an enclosed room with dozens of other people? Or shutting down public parks and beaches but excusing BLM protests because they agreed with their politics?
The Trump admin was cartoonishly inept but the public health experts did plenty to kill their own credibility as well.
> If all states had imposed restrictions similar to those used in the 10 most restrictive states, excess deaths would have been an estimated 10% to 21% lower than the 1.18 million that actually occurred during the 2-year analysis period; conversely, the estimates suggest counterfactual increases of 13% to 17% if all states had restrictions similar to those in the 10 least-restrictive states. The estimated strong vs weak state restriction difference was 271 000 to 447 000 deaths, with behavior changes associated with 49% to 79% of the overall disparity.
Is your implication that COVID was intentionally created in an American bioweapons lab with the goal of creating something both highly deadly and highly transmissible for use in future conflicts?
Take a guess, will Putin prioritize the safety of humans or his own pride? He’s literally waging a war that is based on his warped divine feeling of pride for Rus
Alternatively, that's just an excuse, and he's waging a war because the existential threat to his autocratic kleptocracy by even a modestly successful, somewhat democratic neighboring state with significant inter-country exchange of people and ideas.
Worse yet, this is contained but Putin will use it to argue against foreign actors weakening him further because 'think of the consequences`. I hate how paranoid this timeline has made me.
Ever wonder what a country waging a grinding siege war could do with a plague lab?
That’s keeping me up. Threaten nukes and deploy the plague to show you aren’t kidding.
There was a news story yesterday about the Ukrainian government using drones to airlift medicine to occupied territories that have been cut off from pharmaceutical supply chains (the occupation forces said they would figure it out, but didn’t)
> Ever wonder what a country waging a grinding siege war could do with a plague lab?
There's a reason the US and Soviets were largely willing to get rid of the stuff - it's fairly useless geopolitically, because you mostly can't target it.
Your reassurance relies on strategic calculus of the 20th century, arrived at by a much less cynical leadership, in both cases.
It can definitely be targeted: behind enemy lines, or in the occupied territory with selective access to antibiotics. Population migration can be enforced coercively too.
This is the same regime pulling stunts like this [0] and threatening nuclear war, absolutely would not be surprised.
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky calls Vladimir Putin "patient zero" of global wars spreading: "He must be denied the space to act and the space to spread this evil further."
- Taylor Swift announces surprise new single: “Patient Zero”
There are as many possibilities as one could imagine. This is still hypothetical (as I said in my comment above, I know what I will assume only if it disrupts the elections, and hope it does not, which will restore some trust), but means, motives and who benefits are important to remember when evaluating unknowable situations. Granting the benefit of the doubt is not something I do for this US administration and their fellow travelers.
I agree, which is why it's important to realize that the means for the US administration to cause this are very remote, and the potential benefits of this situation (particularly on the elections as you mention) are even more obscure.
I'm not saying the US hasn't done its fair share of shady and immoral operations, probably more than any other country in the world, but the scenario you propose is more akin to a Rube Goldberg machine than any realistic covert operation.
Once again, this is hypothetical- only if this is not contained, i.e., what ever safety precautions to prevent this were broken.
Your lack of belief in how covert operations work shows a lack of history. I obviously have no secret knowledge about his, but even reading one or two historical accounts about intelligence services (and others) would prove you wrong
This disease is generally highly treatable. Your conspiracy theory hinges on a belief that a treatable disease in a foreign country will be used to do something with the ongoing (ballots are already going out) US midterm elections, when in 2020 the US still held regular elections despite the ongoing, and far less treatable at the time, COVID pandemic.
My original comment is flagged, so I will assume you didn’t read it and don’t understand my hypothetical. Here it is: if this is used as a pretext to prevent the US mid-term elections, then I will assume that it was intentional (accepting that it might have merely just been taken advantage of), because this is an unknowable situation for me (and you), and this administration does not deserve the benefit of the doubt in anything it does anymore
I did read it. It was an idiotic hypothetical. Your hypothetical is hinged on something not based in reality.
2020 with COVID was far worse than something that's still literally thousands of miles from the US and we still held elections in the US. Midterm elections have already started, so even if this was some bizarre CIA plot, it'd be the least effective way to achieve their goals. They failed before they began because, again, the elections are already happening.
It's unfounded in Ukraine and it's unfounded in the context of the casus belli which had as much to do with WMDs as when the US invaded Iraq, which is to say nothing.
Since they can't waste a paragraph satisfying pedants, "unfounded" is as good as anything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_biological_weapons_prog...
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/rr/rr7003a1.htm?
>"When we first heard Soviet scientists were inserting the endorphin gene [for euphoria] into plague," says Dr. Henry Heine, a former U.S. Army bacteriologist, "we were appalled. That they would purposefully engineer the Y. pestis bacteria to behave this way... to make you want to go out and socialize... this was some horrifying stuff."
> . . .
> Former assistant secretary of defense Andy Weber agrees. "I grew up thinking Reagan’s phrase ‘Evil Empire’ was an exaggeration," he tells us. "Then I learned what the Russians were doing [with biological warfare]." He pauses for effect. "It was evil."
The accounts are from Annie Jacobsen's notes in "Biological War".
Perhaps the Russian military is overreacting with the blanket quarantines, but the odds are more likely that they understand the nature better than anyone else.
Again, normal pneumonic plague approaches 100% fatality rates. This is potentially a weaponized form.
This is an "oh, fuck" moment.
To some billionaires. Congress isn't doing jack shit in statute.
Pneumonic is the most transmissible. That's why this is worth paying attention to. Not reacting to in any manner. But keeping a close eye on. Russia being Russia we'll probably only learn if containment was lost from Mongolia or China.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumonic_plague
> Former head of the national public health agency Rospotrebnadzor stated that the disease the researcher died of is "most likely not the plague, but even if confirmed, there will be no spread of this disease
Very reassuring.
Nobody who dies of obesity-related health issues is a member of the global poor.
Why pneumonic plague? Pneumonic plague is the form of infection that occurs when plague bacteria are inhaled in aerosolized form into the lungs, or when septicemic plague (plague in the bloodstreams) reaches the lungs. Like, for example, when a test tube breaks. Her method of infection was a pretty textbook vector for pneumonic plague. Other cases have been caused when tissue samples of infected rodents have been splayed open, for example, or when blood from an infected person splatters the respiratory tract. Plague bacteria spreads pretty poorly otherwise, which is why the main vector for bubonic plague is flea bites.
> It remains unclear how she became unwell.
That's some fine reporting right there.
Remember all the theater around wearing your mask to your restaurant table and then taking it off for your entire meal in an enclosed room with dozens of other people? Or shutting down public parks and beaches but excusing BLM protests because they agreed with their politics?
The Trump admin was cartoonishly inept but the public health experts did plenty to kill their own credibility as well.
> If all states had imposed restrictions similar to those used in the 10 most restrictive states, excess deaths would have been an estimated 10% to 21% lower than the 1.18 million that actually occurred during the 2-year analysis period; conversely, the estimates suggest counterfactual increases of 13% to 17% if all states had restrictions similar to those in the 10 least-restrictive states. The estimated strong vs weak state restriction difference was 271 000 to 447 000 deaths, with behavior changes associated with 49% to 79% of the overall disparity.
Ever wonder what a country waging a grinding siege war could do with a plague lab?
That’s keeping me up. Threaten nukes and deploy the plague to show you aren’t kidding.
There was a news story yesterday about the Ukrainian government using drones to airlift medicine to occupied territories that have been cut off from pharmaceutical supply chains (the occupation forces said they would figure it out, but didn’t)
There's a reason the US and Soviets were largely willing to get rid of the stuff - it's fairly useless geopolitically, because you mostly can't target it.
It can definitely be targeted: behind enemy lines, or in the occupied territory with selective access to antibiotics. Population migration can be enforced coercively too.
This is the same regime pulling stunts like this [0] and threatening nuclear war, absolutely would not be surprised.
[0] https://www.occrp.org/en/news/putins-chef-sends-bloody-sledg...
a) why are we comparing treated death rates with untreated death rates?
b) COVID got significantly less deadly as it evolved, which is a known phenomenon that should also apply to this plague
c) that link hijacked my back button, I don't appreciate that >:-(
This is the successor state to the country that thought it could hide a cloud of nuclear fallout.
Oh, and National Security Advisor.
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky calls Vladimir Putin "patient zero" of global wars spreading: "He must be denied the space to act and the space to spread this evil further."
- Taylor Swift announces surprise new single: “Patient Zero”
I agree, which is why it's important to realize that the means for the US administration to cause this are very remote, and the potential benefits of this situation (particularly on the elections as you mention) are even more obscure.
I'm not saying the US hasn't done its fair share of shady and immoral operations, probably more than any other country in the world, but the scenario you propose is more akin to a Rube Goldberg machine than any realistic covert operation.
Your lack of belief in how covert operations work shows a lack of history. I obviously have no secret knowledge about his, but even reading one or two historical accounts about intelligence services (and others) would prove you wrong
Your hypothetical is not based in reality.
2020 with COVID was far worse than something that's still literally thousands of miles from the US and we still held elections in the US. Midterm elections have already started, so even if this was some bizarre CIA plot, it'd be the least effective way to achieve their goals. They failed before they began because, again, the elections are already happening.
Since they can't waste a paragraph satisfying pedants, "unfounded" is as good as anything.