Black Death Discovered In Oregon 404
redletterdave writes "The Black Death, a strain of bubonic plague that destroyed nearly a third of Europe's entire population between 1347 and 1369, has been found in Oregon. Health officials in Portland have confirmed that a man contracted the plague after getting bitten by a cat. The unidentified man, who is currently in his 50s, had tried to pry a dead mouse from a stray cat's mouth on June 2 when the cat attacked him. Days later, fever and sickness drove the man to check himself into Oregon's St. Charles Medical Center, where he is currently in 'critical condition.'"
Re:The Plague (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:2012 strikes again (Score:5, Interesting)
No, must be confirmation bias on your part.
Black Plague is rare, but still happens you just usually don't hear about it because it's treatable with antibiotics and preventable by controlling rodent populations - neither antibiotic treatment nor effective prevention were known in europe during the middle ages.
Re:Biggest question... (Score:2, Interesting)
Good thing that bacteria cant become resistant to antibiotics, right?
captcha: evasion
Re:2012 strikes again (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:stupid (Score:5, Interesting)
A feral cat is a descendant of a domesticated cat that has returned to the wild. [wikipedia.org]
Have you ever seen a domesticated tiger? What about a domesticated fox [wikipedia.org]?
The difference between is mostly just a few generations of human attention. There are some more gradual changes (and numerous abrupt physical changes) at work in dogs, which creates the gap between 'feral' and 'wild' for them, but the most important alterations are purely in how the animal has been raised. Barn cats have been selected for their ability to survive and hunt, after all, for most of history. Not very pet-like traits.
Re:Black Death? no, epidemiology guesses Ebola lik (Score:5, Interesting)
Some people think it was the bubonic plague because that matches _some_ of the symptoms reported at the time and y. pestis has been found in mass graves from the period. (Obviously people who disagree are pulling out the "correlation does not equal causation" card.)
Other people believe it was ebola, anthrax, or something else because the incubation period, the rate and nature of the spread, and some of the symptoms don't match those of the modern bubonic plague.
Some people believe it was the y. pestis, but it behaved differently back then because humans had zero immunity when it was introduced, and both humans and the bacteria have had a few centuries to evolve since then.
And some people believe that it wasn't just one disease that was responsible for the black death but a number of different diseases sweeping through around the same time. They didn't know much about disease at the time, and if everyone has heard of the black death and a bunch of people get sick and die, everyone is going to blame it on the black death.
Re:The Plague (Score:4, Interesting)
Yep, it was a 50-year-old men. People in that demographic are infamous for avoiding medical treatment until it's too late.
That is because by the time we are that old, we know that most doctors don't actually know as much as they think (meaning they tend to guess alot), and don't want to pay the high price for that.
Re:2012 strikes again (Score:2, Interesting)
neither antibiotic treatment nor effective prevention were known in europe during the middle ages.
Neither were there pervasive antibiotic resistant bacteria. Today it is "treatable with antibiotics"; but we cannot rely on there not being new strains that are resistant to antibiotics.
Re:Biggest question... (Score:2, Interesting)
Wrong. Bacteria absolutely can become resistant to antibiotics. Scientists have recreated this phenomenon countless times in the lab. Now whether MRSA pre-existed the use of modern antibiotics, I don't know. Maybe you're right.
Of course, we're both playing fast-and-loose with terminology. By create, of course, I presume we're both referring to the evolutionary mechanism of selective pressure.
Re:2012 strikes again (Score:5, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)