The Black Death Plague Just Reappeared In China (bgr.com) 115
At least two people in China are under close observation and are receiving treatment for infections of the same plague that devastated Europe in the mid-1300s. The two confirmed cases originated in north China and were confirmed by doctors in Beijing earlier this week. From a report: The pneumonic variant of the plague, which affects the lungs, can easily spread to others through the air. It is one of the three main forms of plague infection, alongside bubonic and septicemic, but it's believed that the pneumonic form was largely responsible for the rapid spread of plague during the Black Death pandemic that wiped out as much as half of Europe's population centuries ago. While it hasn't led to a full-scale pandemic for some time, plague -- a bacterial infection that is treated with antibiotics -- is known to persist in certain animal populations across Asia as well as the Americas and Africa. The pneumonic form, however, is rare and considered to be a more serious threat. It is almost always deadly if not promptly treated. China's Xinhua news agency didn't provide many details on the condition of the two patients or if they had contact with others. The report simply notes that "relevant disease prevention and control measures have been taken."
In before WindBourne gets too excited (Score:5, Informative)
In the United States, there have been anywhere from a few to a few dozen cases of plague every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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The US plague reservoir in the Four Corners region arrived in the 1890s on ships carrying Chinese laborers to San Francisco. This is literally a century-plus old story.
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Funny thing, the reason for the banning was because they were taking our jobs. At least that's what was being said at the time.
So as a result of us using slave laborer, we then complained those same people were taking our jobs. Brilliant!
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the US
Uh, no.
Care to reword this?
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Yes, in places like San Francisco but not this type though. This is an airborne plague, and a communist government telling us everything is okay does not inspire confidence.
It would be like San Francisco telling us the plague problem is taken care of but then not having people prosecuted for public urination and defecation, I'm sure their governments and prosecutors would never let a plague break out in their cities like that.
Re: In before WindBourne gets too excited (Score:2)
This is an airborne plague,
An airborne outbreak (pneumatic instead of lympatic) of the same microorganism; it's quite common and is carried by prairie dogs in the western great plains (I refuse to capitalize; they're too ugly) and obviously elsewhere.
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Re: In before WindBourne gets too excited (Score:4, Informative)
An airborne outbreak (pneumatic instead of lympatic) of the same microorganism;
Not exactly. Same species sure, but pneumonically transmitted Yersinia pestis is a different strain from bubonic or gastrointestinal transmission [nih.gov]. For example "One of the major virulence determinants encoded on the pPCP1 plasmid that is required for the development of pneumonic plague is the protease Pla.".
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"Great Scott!" -- Dr. Emmett Brown (capitalization original)
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Uh, the laborers carrying the plague lived in the Four Corners region. That's New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona and Utah. They just passed through San Francisco. I live in New Mexico, everyone here knows about the plague. We get minor outbreaks every once in a while. It's treatable these days, as long as you catch it quickly enough. Generally we don't worry about it because it is too dry for fleas in many parts of the state, and that is the most common way for it to jump from rodents to humans. Most times we do
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Uh, the laborers carrying the plague lived in the Four Corners region.
So I get that the rodents in the desert southwest are a "reservoir" for plague, including the Hantavirus.
Be careful about contact with rodents, dead or alive, and anywhere they have lived in confined spaces.
If you were around back when the Hantavirus made news you heard all about that.
But I guess I missed something about the laborer part - whether that has anything to do with Bubonic or Hanta.
What laborers are you referring to that lived in the four corners region?
Especially regarding the comment
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The workers worked on more than just "The" transcontinental railroad. I quote "the" because there is much more than just the first US transcontinental railroad, that is still considered "transcontinental." See here for examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Honestly though I just assumed that Applehu Akbar knew what they were talking about regarding the southwest plague reservoir's origins, and was correcting a misinterpretation of Applehu Akbar's comments by guruevi. Nobody was saying anything about p
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Thanks for the clarification.
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As long as antibiotics work and there is generally good medical care for the victims, the "black death" is actually not that much of a problem. Most historical plague victims died from other causes or were weakened from other causes before the plague killed them. The main killer was collapse of society with people fleeing in panic, waste disposal going from bad to non-existent, etc.
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Plague never went away. Stop with the clickbait. (Score:2)
Actually the plague germs have never gone away. They didn't suddenly reappear in China, and the clickbait headline is another symptom of the malaise of Slashdot.
The real story is that hygiene has improved and few people get sick these years. And even when it does happen, we (so far) have been able to quickly contain the illness before any real epidemic starts.
However it's hard to get people to click on such boring realities.
That's one side. On the bleak side, with cheap CRISPR kits we have now arrived at an
Fortunately, we have Antibiotics (Score:5, Interesting)
We can cure all forms of Plague (AFAICT) with Antibiotics these days.
That is, until we manage to create an Abx-Resistant strain or two...
But it's kind of cool: Instead to rats to spread the disease, we have airplanes!
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Mostly, yes though it still has a non-zero mortality rate when treated.
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Mostly, yes though it still has a non-zero mortality rate when treated.
Yeah but going up and down stairs also has a non zero mortality rate.
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Not dead yet.
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By nature, firefighting is a generally dangerous profession, with an average of 116 deaths per year over the last 35 years (this data excludes the September 11 attacks). While stress-induced heart attacks and strokes are the leading issue, falls constitute up to 6% of all deaths, according to the U.S. Fire Administration. Historically, the fire pole has been a culprit.
https://www.nfpa.org/News-and-... [nfpa.org]
Two firefighters fell from ladders: one while climbing an aerial ladder during a high-rise fire training exercise and another from the basket of an aerial while fighting a structure fire.
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In that case you're dying literally every time you beam.
It needs to deconstruct you into a transportable medium, at which point you would be considered dead, and forever lost were something to go terribly wrong. Then a new but similar version of you gets re-constructed on the other end.
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But, beaming kills your current body and delivers you into a copy. It has a 100% mortality rate. 110% in the case where the ass is delivered in reverse.
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If using the stairs carried a 15% mortality rate, we might not use stairs anymore.
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The rats were framed!!!!
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The rats were framed!!!!
They may have been. The black death killed many people in Iceland, but Iceland had no rats in the 14th century.
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Re:Fortunately, we have Antibiotics (Score:4, Interesting)
The rats were framed!!!!
Yes, they were. It was gerbils [pnas.org].
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And we know how the gerbils would be passed from victim to victim to spread the disease in San Francisco, don't we?
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But it's kind of cool: Instead to rats to spread the disease, we have airplanes!
Obligatory: Plage Inc. [ndemiccreations.com]
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Previously, the rats needed assistance from ships.
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Re: Fortunately, we have Antibiotics (Score:2)
Apparently it might actually have been humans with fleas and lice that spread the plague, not rats: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/sci... [bbc.co.uk]
Must be within a day of symptoms, 10% still die (Score:2)
Per wikipedia's several interconnected articles on plague: Death rate of the various forms of plague drops (from 30-70% for the bubonic form, near total for pneumonic or septicemic) to about 10% with antibiotic treatment.
Further, the antibiotics need to be administered within a day after symptoms show up or they don't substantially improve the death rate.
(If y. pestis even develops resistance to an antibiotic-of-choice it will be worse than with a lot of other bugs. That short time window for treatment m
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In the 1990s the Clinton Administration did a tabletop wargame of a terrorist release of pneumonic plague in (IIRC) a concert hall in Boulder, CO. The results were not pretty, within a week the supply of antibiotics and respirators in Colorado and all of the surrounding states was exhausted and by the second week plague had spread to both coasts and had arrived in Singapore. In response FEMA developed "Push Packs", cargo containers of drugs and equipment spread around the country that could be delivered w
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Reappeared? It has always been there (Score:5, Informative)
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In the US as well - it shows up in the Four Corners area of the southwest every few years.
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In the US as well - it shows up in the Four Corners area of the southwest every few years.
Originally came in through the port of San Francisco.
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In the US as well - it shows up in the Four Corners area of the southwest every few years.
There has been at least one case reported every year since 1965, recently there have been 5-6 cases in the U.S. every year, in 2015 it increased to 16 [cdc.gov]. The years with no reported cases between 1900 and 1965 (11 or so) are probably due to poor reporting, not no cases.
Re:Reappeared? It has always been there (Score:5, Informative)
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Yeah, I was wondering if anyone else was going to point this out. We find plague carriers in the northwest fairly regularly. This is why I'm pro-coyote [avma.org]. They can be carriers, but they also eat other carriers which are more likely to enter your home.
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I traveled through Siberia with a couple of scientific expeditions and we were taught to recognize the symptoms.
You won't believe what happened next!
(seriously though, sounds like a good book intro)
No worries... (Score:1)
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Reported cases.
Re:No worries... (Score:5, Funny)
So what you're saying is China is copying us AGAIN?!
Re:No worries... (Score:5, Insightful)
There are ten times as many cases per year in the USA than in China, so it is all right then...
10 times as many? Check your facts. In 2017 there were five [cdc.gov], generally we average 7 cases per year, of which 80% are bubonic (not airborne). If we assume that the other 20% are pneumonic (airborne) plague, that's 1.4 cases per year of.
China just reported 2 cases of pneumonic plague. And China is often found to be understating (lying) about problems like this.
Slow news day + sensationalist headline (Score:3)
Tabloids probably keep a file of stuff like this, and punch it up when the inevitable occurs. Here's the rundown on pneumonic plague [wikipedia.org]. Next headline? Volcano in Pacific Awakens!
LIES! It's ZOMBIES! (Score:1)
what made the plague so bad was (Score:2)
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Another factor is that people with European ancestors are descended from the more resistant portion of the population. Natural selection in action.
Simple sanitation is another large factor.
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The plague was not the cause of the deaths, it was a symptom. The cause was hunger. Too many people for an agricultural system that could not support them. On top of that, Europeans started to use horses instead of oxes for traction. Horses work about 4 times faster, but also eat about 4 times more.
There were a lot of diseases in those days, and the plague was one of them. Plague is not usually not as dangerous as the stories will tell; it was the hunger that made people more susceptible to the plage. That
Re:what made the plague so bad was (Score:5, Informative)
Hans Holbein the Younger was 46 when he died of the plague.
Anne of Bohemia - the first wife of King Richard II - died of the plague aged 28.
Blanche of Lancaster - mother of Henry IV was 23 when she died of the plague.
Pope Pelagius II died the same way, age unknown.
Joan of England was a daughter of Edward III, she was 15 when she died.
Hamnet Shakespeare, son of William, was 11 when he died.
Alfonso XI, king of Castile, León and Galicia was 39.
Those are a few of the wealthy people who died of the plague, although that does not prove a lot.
Whole villages died out, swathes were cut through towns. I'm prepared to believe that people with a poor diet were more susceptible to illness but your assertion is simply not borne out by the facts.
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I'm prepared to believe that people with a poor diet were more susceptible to illness but your assertion is simply not borne out by the facts.
If you can read dutch, this book [landwijzer.be] can tell you all about it. That some known people died of the disease as well does nothing to negate the hunger of those days. Mind you, the hunger did not mean that people did not eat. Hungry people eat, because they are hungry. In fact, hungry people eat anything, and that was the problem. The argicultural system in those days did not produce healthy food in large parts of Europe. This also explains why the swampy Netherlands were largely unaffected (in the part North of t
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If half the population is sick, in a society where 90% of the population works on the fields, obviously there was starvation.
Nevertheless the people died to sickness, mostly and not starvation. It takes half a year to starve to death.
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All the Evidence says Otherwise (Score:3)
The plague was not the cause of the deaths, it was a symptom.
No, plague was the cause of death. Even with modern antibiotics bubonic plague has an 11% mortality rate [wikipedia.org] which rises to 80% untreated, 90-95% for pneumonic plague and 100% for septicemic plague. Mass graves in Europe have yielded unambiguous DNA evidence of the bacterium causing the plague (same article).
So we know that those who died were infected by the plague and that modern, non-starving people have an 80% mortality rate at best without treatment. This shows that any impact of hunger would be minima
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The plague was not the cause of the deaths, it was a symptom. The cause was hunger. Too many people for an agricultural system that could not support them. On top of that, Europeans started to use horses instead of oxes for traction. Horses work about 4 times faster, but also eat about 4 times more.
There were a lot of diseases in those days, and the plague was one of them. Plague is not usually not as dangerous as the stories will tell; it was the hunger that made people more susceptible to the plage. That was why large parts of Europe had so many deaths.
It wasn't hunger. If there was a lack of food you wouldn't have the populations living in towns and cities in the numbers that you did in the 1300s-1400s. The fact that so many people lived in cities instead of on subsistence farms shows that agriculture had progressed to the point where smaller numbers of farmers could feed larger numbers of people. People living in the towns were more likely to be better off than those living outside of towns because they were traders, merchants, craftsmen. The founda
Re:what made the plague so bad was (Score:4, Interesting)
The plague was not the cause of the deaths, it was a symptom... Plague is not usually not as dangerous as the stories will tell; it was the hunger that made people more susceptible to the plage. That was why large parts of Europe had so many deaths.
This appears to be a muddled recounting of some recent views about the calamitous 14th Century in Europe. There was a catastrophic famine in Europe from 1315-1317 [wikipedia.org] in which full recovery of the food supply for survivors did not occur until 1322. The Black Death arrived in 1347, 25 years after the end of this period of hunger. It is hypthesized that the damage this starvation period had on surviving children led to increased vulnerability to infection that facilitated the catastrophic effects of the plague in mid-life.
As Roger W Moore posts here, we know for a fact that those who were reputed to have died from the plague actually did die from Yersinia pestis infection because we can examine mass graves with DNA analysis.
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There was a catastrophic famine in Europe from 1315-1317 [wikipedia.org]
I recently watched an episode on the History Channel that said that global climate patterns had shifted during that time frame as well....and don't forget that this coincides with the Hundred Years' War.
https://www.history.com/topics... [history.com]
Something interesting is that there's still debate about the actual disease responsible for the plague. The documentary states that even though Yersinis Pestis has been found in the DNA remains recovered in mass graves from that period, it doesn't make much sense because of
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one of my hobbies is to figure out how fast something can travel or information can travel. Would you be so kind as to give me a link to the problem in question.
and
This is my favorite information speed discoveries was about the Incas, The king and nobles had messengers running all about, and he could get news from 500 miles away in less than 48 hours. my very best estimate of time for them is 4 minutes to the mile. but I calculate always at 5 minutes to the mile based on 24 hours. This system was maintained
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I don't have specific numbers, but it's interesting that you mention the Mongols. The documentary stated that the plague first started in the Far East, and that the first contact that Europeans had with it was during the Mongol Siege of Kaffa, which happened in 1346. You may be able to determine the timeline based off of 1346 as a start date.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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If it's war caravan's, then it speed is about 8 to 20 miles a day, mongol horse riders might go scouting 25 to 50 miles from home base in a day, but the effective range for land troops movement is about 8 miles in a day, retreat or attack movements might be as high as 20 total miles in a day.
By any chance would you happen to know where there are historical dates of known and guessed outbreaks, sometimes speed can be determined from just walking a trail that you find on a satellite map. modern human fast wal
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Pneumonic or Bubonic (Score:2)
The report I read indicated that it was the bubonic form which wiped out a large proportion of the population, not a surprise because it has been referred to as "bubonic plague" for years.
Re:Pneumonic or Bubonic (Score:5, Informative)
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Both Bubonic and Pneumonic plagues are caused by the same bacterium, it seems possible that a strain which could take both forms caused the Black Death since both forms were reported all across Europe, frequently in the same localities. It would be in the slower-spreading bubonic form when being transported by rats, for instance in grain shipments, or fleas, in refugees' clothing. Under certain conditions it could change to the pneumonic form, rip through the population, infect the dying people's fleas, w
Mongolia (bordering China) (Score:3, Interesting)
These people eat raw fucking live of dead animals thinking it's going to bring them luck and health.
Re:Mongolia (bordering China) (Score:5, Funny)
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They are presumably still alive*, so the luck part is true.
* or we would be talking about a much bigger number than 2.
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These people eat raw fucking live of dead animals thinking it's going to bring them luck and health.
Well, the ones that survive clearly were lucky and healthy so you can see how this story got started.
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If you're gonna eat marmot liver, it's only decent to make sure the marmot is dead first.
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My friend was traveling through Mongolia and what happened was, some family ate a dead marmot raw liver, and got infected by the plague. The Mongolian town was quarantined and he couldn't get out (it was reported by some minor news agencies, and can be found on google). These people eat raw fucking live of dead animals thinking it's going to bring them luck and health.
To be fair, bad luck and poor health still qualify as "luck and health"...so they weren't wrong.
Black Death? No Problem (Score:1)
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Pneumonica can't be always deadly (Score:4, Informative)
Otherwise humanity would have gone extinct in the 14th century. Our ancestors are the survivors who were resistent which is probably why plagues caused by this disease eventually died out long before modern antibiotics came on the scene.
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There could be an alternative explanation - population density was lowered sufficiently to prevent effective spread of the very virulent disease.
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There could be an alternative explanation - population density was lowered sufficiently to prevent effective spread of the very virulent disease.
Yep, when 1/3-1/2 of people in a city start dropping dead population density drops real quick. People avoid contact with others, infected houses get boarded up (locking in both infected and non-infected), etc. Makes it much harder for a disease to spread.
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FTFY
* from southern tip of Italy to Norway is not just a city.
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Yep, when 1/3-1/2 of people in a continent* start dropping dead population density drops real quick.
FTFY
* from southern tip of Italy to Norway is not just a city.
I was referring specifically to cities. As the plague spread and cities started dying by the neighborhood, people would lock themselves away. Travel would die down as people wouldn't move between cities (or would be barred from entering plague-free cities if they did move around). In an age where travel took a really long time, and with a disease that would kill, or at least show symptoms, really quickly, this helps slow down the spread of a disease.
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Not getting infected by luck does not mean you are resistant.
I'm actually not aware of any resistancies in humans to any germs. Strong enough imune system, to fend them off, yes. But truly resistant? I doubt it.
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Re: Pneumonica can't be always deadly (Score:2)
"Otherwise humanity would have gone extinct in the 14th century. Our ancestors are the survivors who were resistent which is probably why plagues caused by this disease eventually died out long before modern antibiotics came on the scene."
OTOH the organism causing the disease has no evolutionary pressure to murder everything, or it would go extinct. More likely the population density declined enough that it couldn't spread.
By all means go test yourself for resistance to ancient plagues, we'll have a Darwin
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Guy de Chauliac, surgeon for Pope Clement during the plague, contracted it and survived.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
So what? (Score:2)
"From 2010 to 2015, there were 3248 cases reported worldwide, including 584 deaths. "
WHO
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blah blah blah woke bullshit blah blah
The USA has plenty of slums too
So you're saying this is good news? (Score:2)
OK.
I can see how you might think that.
Great! (Score:1)
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Taiwan?
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Don't they have an over population problem? Perhaps China?