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
In a similar vein, I highly recommend Annie Jacobsen's recent book, Biological War: A scenario. It dives into the Soviet/Russian biological weapons programs and discusses facilities such as the Vector Institute (State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology) located in Koltsovo, Siberia. Interestingly enough, the scenario follows a lab leak of weaponized plague at this research facility... having read the book it was rather shocking to see this headline.
The algorithm giveth, and the algorithm keepeth away.
Before I clicked that link I had never heard of Breaking Points, a political series with over 2MM subscribers. I'm a YT premium subscriber and watch a ton of political stuff, much of it damn similar to what that channel produces.
I also watched a lot of news content and never saw them until seeking them out. I suspect they are suppressed by the algorithm because they are generally willing to give voice to anti-establishment, anti-oligrachy sentiments (both from the hosts and guests). But yea they're great. The primary hosts are explicitly left and right leaning but rarely get caught up in partisan discord and instead focus on high quality, fact based journalism. (Relatedly, the one topic that does most often trigger the occasional bouts of partisan bickering between Saagar and Krystal is COVID and Dr. Fauci, make of that what you will).
Funnily enough the reason why virology therapy (something the Soviets did a lot of research in cuz they didn't have good antibiotics and biotech/pharma) hasn't seen much success at scale is precisely because the body's immune system adapts too quickly. Maybe we will see more success now with AI but it will be a cold day in hell before the powers that be let any garage biohacker have access to LLMs trained on this sort of information.
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".
Jacobsen is also the author who claimed that the Roswell event was a Soviet plot to sow panic with an actual Nazi flying saucer piloted by genetically-engineered midgets, so I'd like to see a reputable source. (Having said that, bacteria upregulate selected interleukins to reduce inflammation, so maybe this is a game of telephone based on some actual Soviet effort to increase virulence, just not "euphoria.")
> Jacobsen is also the author who claimed that the Roswell event was a Soviet plot to sow panic with an actual Nazi flying saucer piloted by genetically-engineered midgets, so I'd like to see a reputable source.
Where was this claimed? Do we have any definitive confirmation of the Roswell incident anyway?
This sounded so ridiculous that I had to check. The book is Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base. This unflattering contemporary review, retrieved from the Wayback Machine, has an excerpt:
The engineers were told that the children were rumored to have been kidnapped by Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi madman who, at Auschwitz and elsewhere, was known to have performed unspeakable experimental surgical procedures mostly on children, dwarfs, and twins. The engineers learned that just before the war ended, Josef Mengele made a deal with Stalin. Stalin offered Mengele an opportunity to continue work in eugenics. . . . in secret, in the Soviet Union.
Mengele held up his side of the Faustian bargain and provided Stalin with the child-size crew. . . .
> Jacobsen is also the author who claimed that the Roswell event was a Soviet plot to sow panic with an actual Nazi flying saucer piloted by genetically-engineered midgets
Endorphins make you happy as you are. Endorphins have sedative effect. Morphine is a similar substance and it is a sedative, all opioids are.
What makes one socialize is dopamine [1]: "Hypomania, manifesting with feelings of euphoria, omnipotence, or grandiosity are prone to appear in those moments when medication (dopaminergic medication - thesz) effects are at their maximum."
This dopamine dysregulation occurs naturally in people with toxoplasmosis.
This kind of mistake - mistaking dopamine and endorphine, - strongly suggests a fake. I know of one such fake from the former employee of my friend, you can read his account here [2]. My friend was a lead of the "secret" laboratory (next to Kitay Gorod metro station in the center of Moscow, in an institute that needed no documents to enter) that researched how "psychics" and "healers" achieve their results.
The laboratory researched what these "extrasensing people" do and found nothing - given very little training an ordinary men can do the same and even better. At the end of USSR, there was a string of visitors from USA there in the lab, and one of those visitors successfully persuaded US government to open similar research program, according to [2].
The fearmongering of "endorphin-producing bugs that make one socialize and spread" looks like, well, fearmongering to obtain funds for Big Pharma's government contracts, etc. It messes up two very different neurotransmitters, a mistake that real scientist would not make.
Sedatives are often also dis-inhibitory drugs (like alcohol, but that one has a more complicated profile also involving dopamine) and benzos, and they contribute to socialization by downregulating inhibitory behavior.
(the link is a translation to Russian, I was unable to find the original text in English)
Also consider that toxoplasma changes rat's dopamine serum level to such extent that they stop fearing cats. The same happens with humans, changes in dopamine serum level are so profound that toxoplasma-infected people become more appealing than regular people.
Those two things are not alike, and the claim about Wikipedia is a blatant lie ... certainly it is vastly more reliable than you are. Other comments from you:
> there is a gatekeeping cretin in his basement hitting refresh to make sure he controls the world's definition for egg salad.
Regarding Reddit, there is a lining of truth behind his claim (despite possibly being a troll based on account age). Someone years ago made a well written post about it on reddit (yes I know, kind of ironic)
Things have certainly changed since the introduction of AI, but I still believe the status quo is mostly the same regarding people who create content or write content and people who passively consume it.
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.
Making it antibiotic resistant is not difficult and they already did that back when they were the USSR. Not only did they develop it, they produced large quantities of it to stockpile for a rainy day.
The phrase "gain-of-function research" has acquired almost magical properties on the Internet. You can do literally anything you want to a pathogen with it.
Purposely giving a pathogen increased infection abilities and more lethality, and expecting to be able to contain it in a lab has proven to be wishful thinking time and again.
Gosh I hadn't realised there was that much - employing up to 65,000 people and able to produce 100 tons of smallpox!
I read a bit about bioweapons re covid. Apparently Xi said he wanted China on a par with other countries in all military technology which presumably included biological - the Wuhan lab was run by the military and very secretive - China signed the Biological Weapons Convention not do do that kind of thing.
Also a bit on the Ukraine biolabs stuff - there were conspiracy theories they had those making biological weapons funded by the US which I'd assumed was just nonsense but they were actually real soviet bioweapons labs that the US had funded to switch to non weapons research.
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.
> Yes, we have modern medicine, but many people reject it
Yea you are definitely right about that. In Africa (specific countries I can’t currently recall) attempts at vaccination programs for example are often met with hostility or suspicion or even some people believing a vaccine causes the disease.
There was also vaccine skepticism during the COVID-19 pandemic in countries like China which refused first-to-market western vaccines out of fear and suspicion. It’s tragic all around.
There are directives that prevent using clergy and missionary work as a cover for intelligence operations, and a longstanding prohibition for using the peace corps.
That Bin Laden operation was so insanely short-sighted in the use of a vaccine program for spying. Completely erodes trust where it should never have eroded, and rightfully contributed to antivax mentality, not just in Pakistan, but also in the US. "Trust us, we're doctors" means nothing.
Oh well. They shouldn’t have harbored bin Laden. Whatever justification about “loss of trust” you can use here anyone else gets to use too. There was a loss of trust from Dr. Fauci (not by me, I got the vaccine ASAP and wore a mask until restrictions were lifted) by some because of actions taken.
I'm talking about choices made by people doing the hunting. I don't know why you're absolving them as if all choices are good choices. It takes more than a circumstance to justify an action.
I like a win. But a clean win is worth being proud of. It would actually be really cool not to shoot yourself in the foot, I think.
I’m just saying it’s justified, not that it was or is the best choice available. Nobody really knows what choices are available. Pakistan and its people made a choice to harbor bin Laden - they certainly had choices that we don’t need to absolve them for either.
No, my position is closer to that our actions were justified and they (Pakistan, its government, its people) are responsible for harboring bin Laden. They aren’t like doomed forever because of some CIA scheme that helped uncover where that piece of shit is hiding.
If they’re not responsible then everyone else gets to claim not being responsible for the actions of their governments too.
To me there'a a difference between claining citizens having a moral responsibilty for the actions of their government, and some other entity deciding that all of some countrys citizen deserve to be punished for the crimes of said government.
The US government has murdered a lot more civilians than Bin Laden ever did, but there's not really anyone arguing for broad collective punishment of its citizens (well, ecept for thr Bin Laden-likes)
> To me there'a a difference between claining citizens having a moral responsibilty for the actions of their government, and some other entity deciding that all of some countrys citizen deserve to be punished for the crimes of said government.
Sure but that’s a claim you made up, it’s not one I am asserting. For example the US isn’t punishing the people of Pakistan, it simply enacted a temporary and targeted scheme to kill bin Laden. There may be other effects but any action anyone or any country takes has other effects. The government of Pakistan harbored bin Laden and then an effect of that might have been temporary vaccine skepticism. But those are choices the government of Pakistan and the people of Pakistan make too. They are also responsible.
> The US government has murdered a lot more civilians than Bin Laden ever did, but there's not really anyone arguing for broad collective punishment of its citizens (well, ecept for thr Bin Laden-likes)
By that logic the German government, Chinese government, and Russian government have murdered even more.
The US doesn’t intentionally murder civilians though which is a key difference. Results matter but intentions do too.
No, because they are children, but their parents and government are directly responsible.
Your view here is a very western colonial one in which you infantalize other people and cultures and believe you are superior and thus must help them, they have no responsibility for their own actions, and so forth.
If the people of Pakistan (or anywhere) are deprived of their agency as you are here to suggest, then we must colonize them for their own good, set up the institutions, take over their ministry of health, and so forth. That’s how the children get their Polio vaccines. I do not propose this because I do not hold these views, but you cannot escape the effects of the viewpoint in which you espouse here.
Blaming the 340 million citizens of the US for Trump’s actions is repulsive too, but plenty of people enjoy doing that on the Internet.
Sorry. People are responsible for the governments they have. Everyone is, or nobody is.
Those 260 million Pakistanis can educate themselves on vaccines and make informed decisions. Vaccine denial in the US? Same thing. You can’t say Americans are responsible for anti-vax sentiments, for example, and then say other people around the world aren’t.
Or are Americans smarter and better than everyone else and so they’re more responsible? I’ll happily take you admitting we’re the best if you want to go that route.
You know, even being about to talk this much about your own government or foreign governments takes a certain level of privilege. At least 1/5th of Pakistan is in poverty.
I’m proud to be privileged and think more should be.
For example I think Iranians should be privileged to speak out against their repressive government without fear of being hung. Pakistanis aren’t privileged and can’t speak out against their government harboring Bin Laden? Someone should fix that so they are are able to speak out against that, right?
Regardless, being poor doesn’t make one stupid or uneducated. Many Americans who are anti-vax are also poor by American standards, but I don’t think it matters. You can’t have your cake and eat it too here.
The Pakistan/vaccination exchange has several clear examples:
- *Red herring / changing the subject.* The claim being discussed was that the CIA’s use of a fake vaccination program contributed to vaccine distrust in Pakistan. The response is essentially, “Pakistan shouldn’t have been harboring Bin Laden; whatever consequences followed were worth it.” That does not rebut the causal claim about vaccination distrust; it changes the question from “did this action damage trust?” to “was getting Bin Laden morally worth the cost?”
- *Fallacy of division / collective guilt.* “Pakistan” as a state allegedly harboring Bin Laden gets silently converted into responsibility belonging to roughly 260 million individual Pakistanis. The actions or failures of a government do not automatically transfer to every member of its population. That is exactly the problem the reply “blaming the ~260M citizens for the actions of Pakistani government” identifies.
- *Tu quoque / whataboutism.* When challenged on blaming Pakistani civilians, the response becomes, in effect, “people blame Americans for Trump too.” Even if people do unfairly blame Americans collectively, that would not establish that collective blame of Pakistanis is justified. It substitutes another allegedly similar wrongdoing for a defense of the original claim.
- *False dilemma.* “People are responsible for the governments they have. Everyone is, or nobody is.” Those are plainly not the only possibilities. Political responsibility can vary enormously according to voting rights, repression, electoral competitiveness, access to information, individual participation, age, etc. The binary “everyone or nobody” erases all of those degrees.
- *False equivalence.* The argument treats an American voter in a relatively open electoral system and an ordinary citizen living under a much more constrained political system as having essentially the same responsibility for state policy. The later reply directly points out the relevant differences—political freedom, literacy, schooling, and meaningful electoral choice. You don’t have to agree with every factual claim in that reply to see why those variables make the original analogy logically incomplete.
- *Straw man + loaded false dichotomy.* “Or are Americans smarter and better than everyone else… I’ll happily take you admitting we’re the best.” Nobody needs to claim Americans are inherently “smarter and better” in order to argue that Americans may have greater access to education, information, political power, or institutional protections. He replaces the opponent’s actual position with a much more ridiculous one and then invites them to defend it.
There’s another especially clean straw man a few comments later. Someone says that even being able to criticize governments openly reflects a degree of privilege and mentions widespread poverty in Pakistan. The answer becomes “being poor doesn’t make one stupid or uneducated.” But the original claim wasn’t “poor people are stupid”; it was about constraints on access, power, and political participation. He answers a more insulting proposition that nobody made.
There’s also some *equivocation around the word “responsible.”* He moves between at least three different meanings without separating them: having some causal influence over a government, having a civic duty to oppose bad policy, and deserving moral blame for what that government does. “People are responsible for the governments they have” sounds plausible under one meaning and then gets used to justify the much stronger claim that civilians deserve the consequences of state behavior. That slide is doing a lot of argumentative work.
You can see the same general pattern elsewhere. For example, when someone presents declining Treasury purchases as evidence for reserve-currency decoupling, he says that before making an argument about US interest rates/debt, they have to “resolve it for the UK, Italy, France, and others.” That is another relevance shift: problems or counterexamples involving other countries do not have to be “resolved” before the US-specific claim can be evaluated.
So if I were reducing his recurring argumentative style to the most defensible labels, I’d say: *false equivalence, tu quoque/whataboutism, straw man, false dilemma, red herring, collective-guilt/fallacy-of-division, and equivocation over key terms such as “responsibility.”* Those are much stronger and more precise than just calling it “bad faith.”
Is this a conversation you are having with yourself or an LLM response?
> He moves between at least three different meanings without separating them
> he says that before making an argument about US interest rates/debt
> So if I were reducing his recurring argumentative style to the most defensible labels, I’d say:
Not only are you incorrect, your model response is too. I also don’t care about a big dump of alleged fallacies. It’s just meaningless to me. At least have the common courtesy of sanitizing your responses.
> Sorry. People are responsible for the governments they have. Everyone is, or nobody is.
In a democracy, yes. Pakistan however is a democracy only in distant theory, pretty much everyone sane calls it an authoritarian regime [1].
And no, in the age of guns and nuclear weapons, we can't go and blame a country's people for its government. I don't blame Gazan civilians for Hamas, I don't blame Iranian civilians for the Mullahs, I don't blame Chinese peasants for the CCP and I don't blame ordinary Russians for Putin. These people do not have a choice - either openly (e.g. China) or in practice (Pakistan, Russia, Iran).
> Those 260 million Pakistanis can educate themselves on vaccines and make informed decisions.
Pakistanis, especially in rural areas, are barely literate [2], and we're talking basic literacy here. Informed decisions require the ability to both access and understand relevant information.
> Or are Americans smarter and better than everyone else and so they’re more responsible?
Americans (as a whole) are at least better suited. On average they are far more literate, they got actual schools, they have reasonably free elections. Yes, the US democracy is flawed (FPTP and gerrymandering basically rendering the votes of swaths of people irrelevant, billionaires manipulating media coverage, ICE and other government organisations being used for voter suppression), but the US still is miles ahead of Pakistan or virtually all "third world" countries.
> In a democracy, yes. Pakistan however is a democracy only in distant theory, pretty much everyone sane calls it an authoritarian regime [1]
No I reject this and neo-liberal views of the world. That’s the mental model that got us into the Iraq debacle. What follows is that this becomes a problem (authoritarianism) that needs to be corrected “spread democracy”.
> These people do not have a choice - either openly (e.g. China) or in practice (Pakistan, Russia, Iran).
There is always a choice. Democracies weren’t inherent in the world but had to be fought for. They need to fight for their rights. Or not. It’s their responsibility.
> Pakistanis, especially in rural areas, are barely literate [2], and we're talking basic literacy here. Informed decisions require the ability to both access and understand relevant information.
Same was true during the age of European colonialism. “We must christianize them and educate them”. &c &c
> Americans (as a whole) are at least better suited.
As long as you agree Americans are better and exceptional I can’t really argue against you here.
> What follows is that this becomes a problem (authoritarianism) that needs to be corrected “spread democracy”.
Well for once the neoliberals were correct. In fact, the idea of "universal human rights" was a direct lesson out of 1933-1945, and Article 21 [1] directly specifies everyone's right to take part in government.
A right however is only worth more than the paper it's written on as long as it is enforced, and kleptocrats don't tend to hand over their ill-gotten power willingly.
> There is always a choice. Democracies weren’t inherent in the world but had to be fought for. They need to fight for their rights. Or not.
Which the Iranians did, and tens of thousands were slaughtered just this very year while the rest of the world watched. Or many Arab countries that had their version of "Arab Spring". Or the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine that was a direct, if late, consequence of the Maidan revolution.
> It’s their responsibility.
It's ours as well. There's this infamous line you see every time you run "sudo" in a terminal: "With great power comes great responsibility". We, us Western nations, have power, and lots of it - but we are not using it the way we should, we instead are using it mostly to make money.
> As long as you agree Americans are better and exceptional I can’t really argue against you here.
I'm German, and for what it's worth "American Exceptionalism" is a whole lot of bollocks (because guess what, objectively compared Americans are so much worse off in many metrics it isn't even funny any more, just tragic). Doesn't change my (decently sourced) facts.
To be fair, in Europe, we largely rejected the russian COVID vaccine. In theory we had good reasons, the vaccine was a bit shady, but I always wondered how much geopolitics played the role and how much it was really the problem with russian manufacturing standards.
> in Europe, we largely rejected the russian COVID vaccine. In theory we had good reasons, the vaccine was a bit shady
That is an understantement. The Russians publicly acknowlaged the vaccine aproval had been rushed and international protocols hadn't been met. And that is what they said publicly.
Since more reputable vaccines were comming online from other sources, why take the risk?
I’m sure geopolitics had some effect, like it might have in China, but I think that just begs the question how serious the virus was for governments to say nah we will wait until we get our own vaccine from our trusted sources. Russia has vaccine skepticism too entirely if their own making.
In Europe’s defense, which is a very broad thing to speak of anyway, they had a vaccine either already there or close enough so why give Putin any credence when you could wait just a little bit longer?
Sure but the point is to focus on other countries/continents/peoples and their vaccine skepticism because that’s more interesting and less talked about.
I am more interested in my own country (the USA) because it is our national vaccine hesitancy/skepticism/denial/chicanery that will ultimately be more likely to have causal effects on my own health.
I’m less interested in the US’s vaccine hesitancy because it’s already well-known and overly talked about. The US also only represents a small fraction of the global population and so when it comes to things like pandemics it is really important what the rest of the world does and their vaccine skepticism is largely more important from a global perspective.
Focusing on the US is just a western privileged point of view focused on tropes like American exceptionalism.
Tbf Covid was unique in that it was a virus capable of airborne transmission while being asymptomatic and also it can be fatal without killing too quickly. That's extremely unusual. Even more rare, some people never showed symptoms or the symptoms were so mild so it was unclear if it was Covid at all.
Hemorrhagic fevers (including Ebola), for example, are incredibly deadly but that really limits their ability to spread. You still have to be diligent but there's a reason why Ebola has been contained to parts of Africa the the virus seemingly spreads from animals to humans every now and again, starting another local outbreak. But it's never spread globally and it's unlikely to.
Probably the last comparable disease to Covid was the Spanish flu in terms of its ability to spread and that was over 100 years ago. It's worth noting that the Spanish flu could also spread asymptomatically, which also explains it's impact to a large degree. Pretty much every modern influenza variant is a derivative of the Spanish flu, which also tells you something about what tends to happen to novel diseases.
Y pestus is a bacteria, not a virus. We now have antibiotics that could likely combat it, which was obviously something that didn't exist in medieval Europe. Back then it wasn't at all clear that diseases spread by microorganisms at all. Plus, rodents were key to that spread and that's a far smaller problem now.
The nightmare scenario is probably some deadly variant of measles because measles is so incredibly contagious, probably more than any other disease I can think of. It can survive airborne for a very long time and in the modern era we've traced outbreaks of tens of thousands of cases to one single person. But the ability of measles to survive outside a host is also (luckily) incredibly rare.
> ”Pretty much every modern influenza variant is a derivative of the Spanish flu”
Not really. While it was true for much of the last century that many “seasonal flu” viruses were direct descendents from H1N1 Spanish flu, the H1N1 that caused the 2009 “swine flu” pandemic was a distinct strain combining new genes of pig, avian, and human flu origins. Since then, derivatives of that virus have replaced earlier ones as the most common circulating H1N1 types.
And right now the most common circulating influenza is actually H3N2 from a completely different (avian) lineage with origins in the 1968 pandemic.
I'd further note that the H1N1 flu is widely believed to have gone extinct in the wild, then been reintroduced in 1977 from a laboratory source, probably through a failed vaccine trial:
> The reemergence was probably an accidental release from a laboratory source in the setting of waning population immunity to H1 and N1 antigens.19,31
This explanation is now printed uncontroversially in major journals, though at the time the WHO rejected it:
> Laboratory contamination can be excluded because the laboratories concerned either had never kept H1N1 virus or had not worked with it for a long time.
Unfortunately, you can force evolution in bacteria, fungi and viruses. There's more than enough examples of multi-resistant pathogens in all three families, especially in hospitals but also around agriculture (because they use stuff meant as a last-resort to promote animal growth or prevent animals from falling ill to the effects of overcrowding)... honestly between these and prions, I often do wonder how long we as humanity will be able to keep both hospitals and large-scale farming in existence.
Every evolved trait has a cost. We as a civilization have certainly been careless with, say, antibiotic resistance. If we stopped using a certain antibiotic tomorrow and didn't start using it for another 50 years, we'd find that most if not all of the resistant bacteria would've lost that resistance as they'd evolved new traits.
I'm reminded of the pronghorn antelope, a herbivore that evolved fast speed to avoid a predator that no longer exists, a cat having died out 7000+ years ago. It still has that speed but it has a real cost to their metabolism and their need to constantly eat. at some point they're going to lose that if it's not reinforced by some new predator or other evolutionary advantage.
> If we stopped using a certain antibiotic tomorrow and didn't start using it for another 50 years, we'd find that most if not all of the resistant bacteria would've lost that resistance as they'd evolved new traits.
The problem is, for most of the multiresistant species we don't have anything we can use in the 50 years we need to wait for one resistance to be outcompeted. And we haven't discovered any major new class of agents in decades as we cut back foundational research, which makes the situation worse - we don't just have substances, we don't have the pipeline to develop substances.
Sure, for bacteria we got phage therapy, but we lost a lot of the knowledge there during the collapse of the USSR, not all bacteria are suitable for phage usage, phages have their own side effects (including our immune system attacking the phages as well), and we have mRNA based vaccines but these act too late (when the patient has already caught the pathogen) and are useless in immunosuppressed patients such as organ transplant receivers and some cancer patients.
I don't think we are on the verge of a y pestus pandemic, but you dismiss it somewhat lightly. Yes, there are antibiotics but there are also weaponized antibiotic resistant strains. Yes, rodents were key to the spread in medieval europe, but there are now weaponized pneumonic plague strains that spread airborne...
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.
You realize life is complex enough that two things can be true, right? That everything isn't either/or?
The reason we've haven't had more outbreaks of more diseases in the last century is because we had a lot of smart vigilant well-resourced people who very much felt the disease was the problem, and took steps to mitigate.
Classic late-stage civilization blunder is taking the fruits of civilization for granted. Sorry you're not aware of those things, but that's on you.
> 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
'The “young adult male” died eight hours after he was admitted to the hospital, where doctors initially suspected he had hantavirus disease or bacterial pneumonia. Post-mortem testing confirmed Y pestis presence in his blood and lung tissue. It's Arizona’s first pneumonic plague death since 2007.'
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.
I would think the significance being the person was a lab worker. Someone getting hantavirus while camping in Yosemite is a lot less concerning than a lab worker death from pneumonic plague after having a test tube break.
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.
There are three ways the plague manifests: bubonic (Black Death, highly treatable), pneumonic [1] (what this researcher died of) and septicemic (gets in your blood–super nasty, but also doesn't spread easily).
Pneumonic is the most transmissible. There are also no commercially-available vaccines for it in most countries. That's why this is worth paying attention to. Not reacting. But keeping a close eye on. Russia being Russia we'll probably only learn if containment was lost from Mongolia or China.
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
Infection by hantavirus is correlated with where you live, not socioeconomic status. It is endemic to parts of the high desert in the American Southwest and a background risk you accept by living there.
For example, Gene Hackman's wife, Betsy Arakawa, famously died from hantavirus. They lived in a wealthy gated community in Santa Fe.
30 in a population of 350mill is a ~1:10000000 chance of getting it. 900 or so cases in 3 decades. A cursory google search shows it's killed about 300 people since 1990, so roughly 10 a year, the equivalent of venomous snake-related deaths more or less, and that's because we have quick access to anti-venoms for most of the population otherwise the casualties would be far higher.
Treating that low number like a low number is not "discounting" rural US citizens. The US - all populations included - does not really live with the hantavirus in any real sense. It's incredibly rare. 10x as many people are struck by lightening annually in the US.
Sure. It’s still an incredibly tiny number of people annually, especially considering there is no “direct” treatment or cure for it.
It is an incredibly rare disease, so it is hardly something that would qualify as “endemic” to any population in the US. Rural populations in the US do not feel it like rural populations in many other countries. Acknowledging that is not discounting or forgetting rural populations in the US. That is not a fair accusation in the slightest.
Hantavirus is worth worrying about, though. If you have a mouse infestation, don't vacuum up droppings. Put on a mask, spray them with disinfectant, get them nice and wet, wipe them up 10 minutes later while they're still wet, then clean the area again.
Are you seriously accusing an anti-plague institute that works on containing outbreaks of building bio weapons? Maybe try taking the propaganda with a healthy dose of salt
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.
I've got bad news for you. It may seem like a good thing that Y. Pestis is bacterial since we have antibiotics but remember that bacteria can become antibiotic resistant. You might say "no problem, that would only happen if there were a lot of cases and people weren't properly using antibiotics" and while this is true it is also possible to deliberately make Y. Pestis antibiotic resistant. "Who in their right mind would do a stupid thing like that?" you may ask, well it turns out the Soviets did and likely stockpiled large amounts of it with plans to deliver it in an aerosolized form over cities. Aerosolized particles are how you contract pneumonic plague which if you can't treat it with antibiotics is nearly 100% lethal in all cases. It can also be passed from human to human via coughing. So, here's hoping that this is just a rare case of wild type Y. Pestis that the lab worker somehow unfortunately inhaled and didn't get treatment for in time.
Answered this in another comment but my major fear if a bacterial plague like this became a pandemic would be our manufacturing output keeping pace with demand, not like during covid when it was not clear if it was even possible to create a cure.
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
And there might be a teapot on the other side of the sun.
It’s bacteria, antibiotics work more generally than vaccines for viruses do.
There are of course, antibiotic resistant bacteria but we still have some exotic antibiotics in our arsenal.
If anything for a widespread bacterial plague I’d be more concerned about our ability to produce enough antibiotics rather than _if_ we could develop a cure
I mostly agree, but I am more concerned about a strain from a lab than the wild. Many times we study the worst strains, which might mean this has more potential to spread, higher fatality, etc.
Expect more cases of rare things, because more rain = more green plants, which means rodents will be able to breed many fold over. We saw something similar in the 90's
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 have had trouble finding an official source that agrees with that assessment. This source [0], for example, says it is from when symptoms show. Incubation period can be as long as a week.
Absolutely is. About as bad as threatening to mute.
If you have a point you say it, don’t craft a witty question to reveal an error and then respond with a woosh when people think you are being genuine. At any rate the root of the “mistake” was further up.
Lol. You can look it up, but this will kill you in two days if untreated. Most Americans go without treatments for more than 48 hours because they dread the potential medical bill.
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.
