HEADS UP!!! There's another disease!

[RAPPLEBY2000]

Just saw this on Yahoo homepage news!

A town of 10,000 people in north west China has been sealed off from the outside world after an outbreak of deadly pneumonic plague.(similar to bubonic plauge) it can kill within 24 hours!

The town of Ziketan in Qinghai Province has been quarantined after a dozen people were infected with the highly contagious lung disease.
The outbreak has already claimed two lives. A herdsman died from the disease on Friday and his neighbour died on Sunday.
Another 10 people, mostly relatives of the dead men, were undergoing treatment in an isolation hospital. A team of medical experts are being flown into the remote town.
Health authorities are warning that anyone suffering from a cough or fever who has visited the town since the middle of last month should seek urgent medical attention.
There are fears the disease may have spread before the town was sealed off.
Pneumonic plague is easily transmitted through the air and can be passed from person to person by coughing. It is the same bacteria that occurs in bubonic plague.
The Black Death killed more than 25 million people throughout western europe in the Middle Ages.
According to the World Health Organisation, pneumonic plague is one of the deadliest infectious diseases and can kill within 24 hours of infection.

A question has to be raised...so where did it come from? I thought all the plagues were wiped out.

from my vague knowledge of NBC warfare (from my army training), i understood that some countries USSR/USA allegedly kept various deadly illnesses like plague in labs for Biological warfare.:bluThinki

 

[BorderReiver]

Don't Panic!!!!

Yersinia Pestis, the causative organism of plague, has been doing the rounds of poor countries since the Black Death.

It responds well to antibiotics.

 

[calibanzwei]

Nope, not gone yet:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death

The Third Pandemic started in China in the middle of the 19th century, spreading plague to all inhabited continents and killing 10 million people in India alone.[69] The plague bacterium could develop drug-resistance and again become a major health threat. The ability to resist many of the antibiotics used against plague has been found so far in only a single case of the disease in Madagascar.[70] From 1944 through 1993, 362 cases of human plague were reported in the United States; approximately 90% of these occurred in four western states.[71] Plague was confirmed in the United States from nine western states during 1995.[72]

 

[Justin Time]

Apparently it's endemic in rodent populations in some wilder parts of the USA. So you've got be careful out there. Hopefully one of our American friends can give more info on that.

As for wiped out, you might be thinking of smallpox which is regarded by the WHO as having been eradicated in 1979.

 

[RAPPLEBY2000]

Don't Panic!!!!

Yersinia Pestis, the causative organism of plague, has been doing the rounds of poor countries since the Black Death.

It responds well to antibiotics.

Phew!

not quite so bad then, i looked at the Wiki site which showed the symptoms being quite similar to swine flu, i guess they all work a similar way.

 

[spamel]

Phew, I started to panic until I realised I hadn't visited China in the last two months!

 

[Martyn]

not quite so bad then, i looked at the Wiki site which showed the symptoms being quite similar to swine flu, i guess they all work a similar way.

Not exactly, swine flu is a virus, the plague is a bacteria. Very different animals. Bacteria can be killed/treated with antibiotics, viruses are not affected by antibiotics.

In fact viruses are not really living things at all in the true sense of it, they are more like little DNA replicating machines. They dont respire and dont require nutrition, the only life sign they exhibit is replication, for which they require a host - they hijack the hosts own protein factories and re-program them to make the virus instead. Viruses cannot be killed with poisons (antibiotics), all you can do is block their ability to replicate to stop them multiplying with specific drugs (eg Tamiflu), or teach the hosts own immune system to identify and destroy them before they get hold (vaccination).

Bacteria by contrast, are living cellular organisms that feed, respire, excreet and replicate all on their own. That means they can be killed with the right poison.

 

[Bravo4]

Looking at the stats, about half of US plague cases occur here in northern New Mexico. A local park was closed last month due to a plague scare; prairie dogs there and their fleas have got it.

"There have been 260 cases of human plague in New Mexico since 1949 with 34 deaths."
http://www.health.state.nm.us/epi/plague.html
http://www.dhpe.org/infect/plague.html

Number of alcohol related traffic fatalities in New Mexico for the year 2006: 484.
The plague does not make me nervous, walking down the street does.

 

[FoxyRick]

The only infectious disease to have been eliminated is smallpox, iirc. That's the one that the USA and USSR supposedly have the last remaining samples of. I think the last fatality was caused in a lab!

I vaguely recall reading rumours some years ago of a smallpox outbreak in Russia somewhere... but nothing more came of it.

I'm still holding out for a good haemorragic fever.

 

[wanderingblade]

They dont respire and dont require nutrition, the only life sign they exhibit is replication, for which they require a host..........

Yeah, got an estate full of those down the road.