"Could bubonic plague strike again?" Topic

"Scientists have unlocked clues about the strains of bacterium causing two of the world's most devastating plagues, but could it ever kill on a mass scale as it once did?

A team has compared the genomes of the Justinian Plague and the Black Death to find that both were caused by distinct strains of the bacterium Yersinia Pestis.

And while the Justinian Plague strain became extinct, the Black Death-causing pathogen evolved and mutated, still killing today…"
Full article here.
link

Hope not!.

Amicalement
Armand

Depends

It would he hard to make traction in the west where hygene, detection and treatment are so well advanced. Just the normal standards of hygene mitigate against it.

But it might happen.

Hard to believe a bacterium pandamic could occur with all the anti-biotics available today.

I could see it getting out of control in a worn torn third world country though, but not a world wide pandemic.

Bubonic Plague is unlikely to have any resistance to antibiotics, so we'll bombard it with that. Its the germs that we've been quietly evolving resistance into for 50 years that are more of a problem.

And we'll drown any fleas in insecticide.

Don't get too complacent about antibiotics. Bacterial generation time is so short that resistance can evolve very rapidly. This has been exacerbated by the random overuse of antibiotics, particularly in animal husbandry. Bacteria have the ability to transfer genetic material between species. So a harmless bacterium living in the gut of an animal could, potentially, transfer genetic resistance to an unrelated pathogen. The following link gives some idea of the current scale of antibiotic resistance and it will get worse. Hygiene will help, but we need to be very careful in the future.

link

My (limited) understanding is that with overuse of anti-biotics, and the widespread use of stuff like anti-bacterial soaps and cleaners, we've been killing off the weak bacteria and leaving plenty of room for the resistant ones to breed. So if we do get a break out, it won't be easy to stop.

It seems unlikely to have a plague like the Black Death. There are too many points to stop it – kill the rats, kill the fleas, treat folks quickly with antibiotics. I'm more worried about a super virus like some sort of amped up Spanish Flu.

Too hard to spread. Leave it to a new strain of flu. Flu spreads fairly easily once it is the human population, (well compared to the plaque), and vaccines are only about 50% effective. I am actually surprised that we have had not had another Spanish Flu type outbreak.

Looking at how the South fell apart with a couple of inches of snow. Just imagine what happens when 10% of the work force doesn't show up at work. Think of the delays and work stoppages. What happens if that moves up to 20% of the work force not showing up?

I work in a hospital and due to the current flu outbreak, we have a full hospital with very few ICU beds free. This isn't even a major outbreak to be honest, just normal flu season. A real outbreak would bring the medical system crashing down. People will be dying of things that should be easily taken care of. Who will go into an ER if they are full of Flu patients. Then what happens when 10 or 20% of the hospital staff is sick or refusing to come in.

So don't worry about the plague, worry about that person sitting next to you that doesn't look very well that keeps coughing.

Once antibiotics don't help anymore, we can always fall back to the medieval remedies: praying and burning incense.

Quarantine worked

Plauge is spread by fleas, it's not spread through the air like the flue(hence the fear of a deadly flue is much more real)

People do get the plauge now and then, it's not a joke, and if you infect enough people some will die even with anti biotics.

Some of the stuff that help against a major outbreak..

Rats don't carry it much more, while some still, do, the major resouar of plauge in say north america is prery dogs. prery dog fleas jump to dogs or cats, and then to humans, every now and then some people in southern states do get the plauge.

Basic hygine, well says it all doesn't it.

humans are in better health, in europe one of the reasons for the huge death toll was that people were weak from other deseases and lack of proper food. even with out the plauge 50+% of children did not live to 5 years, they were easy targets for the plauge.

Even older people did not have proper nutrition, and so did not have a super imune system.

So realy the only place a major plauge outbreak can happen is say were other outbreaks happen, like colera, so africa basicly or any wartorn asian or african country.

There was a really interesting program a while back on the History channel where scientists argued that the Black Death was not in fact the bubonic plague-and was not spread by rats and fleas.

They argued that based on a number of factors, including the symptoms and the fast spread of the disease that in fact it was more likley a virus -and an ebola type virus at that.

One compelling argument was that there was no rat plague in Eurpoe at the time -they don't find large numbers of rat bones in archaeological digs, and the farmers didn't build their granaries, chicken coops, storerooms etc up high to keep out vermin. Records show that the black death literally jumped from village to village within a day or two with rural people, who were not living in crowded conditions, dying as fast as city dwellers.

In modern examples of bubonic plague the spead of the disease is not as virulent and is isolated. It is more likely to have been a virus spread by human to human contact – one of the symptons was they essentially bled out.

I'm not sure where this sits with the current science, but it was a very thought provoking show.

I am actually surprised that we have had not had another Spanish Flu type outbreak.

We don't have a starving populace. We know the mechanisms of spread. We have programs to enact in the event of a pandemic.

The bit about the world falling apart if 10% of the population stays home sick is wrong in both ways. Firstly the important things still get done. (It was the snow making all traffic difficult that was the problem, not the inability to get to work.) But more importantly because people can now take a sick day, rather than having to go to work, the spread of disease is much slower.

If everyone stayed home every time they were ill, sickness would struggle to stick. It's people going out and about, and especially travelling, that aids transmission.

How many people cant take a sick day because either their work doesn't have sickdays, they live pay day to pay day, or like most of us where I work you know if you call in sick the impossible work load gets put on even less people.

By the time most people are too sick to work, they have already passed on the virus. The stages of a virus attack vary in length by the virus. It is very possible to be contagious before one becomes incapacitated.

I have no doubt that a major virus will break out again. It is sort of like a major fault line. You know it is going to happen sooner or later.

Possible but unlikely. It's the various 'flu mutations that the CDCP's of the world worry about. cdc.gov

Doug makes sense. Take 10% of key personnel (ie the ones who actually do the work, make the decisions etc)out of any organisation unexpectedly & watch the chaos ensue. Then consider 20%, 30% etc……

Sure seems like it, we have plague here in California, a couple of people a year get it but it gets treated and no one usually ends up dead.

Quarantine worked

Not in today's society it wouldn't. Quarantine is by definition a violation of your civil rights. A high percentage of judges would break a quarantine at the blink of an eye. Politicians would dither, it's what they do best.

Anyway, what about people who are allergic to antibiotics?

Since we were smart enough to have sent the biggest rats to Washington DC I think the rest of the country is safe.

Pneumonic plague, sometimes called the "white plague", is a variant of Yersinia Pestis that causes a severe respiratory infection which, once contracted by a human, is transmissible directly between humans. The initial symptoms resemble a severe flu and might be treated as such. Of course, treating a bacterial infection with anti-virals doesn't do much good; people who don't begin an aggressive course of antibiotics with 36 hours usually die.

The disease used to be endemic among ground squirrels in the American west. Just another reason not to eat rodents.

LT

Quarantines are relatively useless today with the amount of air travel that occurs. By the time a fast virulent disease outbreak has been identified in an area, it's been spread to points all around the globe by all the air traffic. You actually look at the CDC reports and you will find a very bleak picture in regards to Quarantines.

Not in today's society it wouldn't. Quarantine is by definition a violation of your civil rights. A high percentage of judges would break a quarantine at the blink of an eye.

No, public health agencies have pretty well-defined powers to quarantine people if they pose a threat to the public's health. My agency has quarantined drug-resistant TB cases for up to a year (and paid for their room and board). I can't recall any cases where a judge over-ruled us. But then we try our best to only quarantine people who need it, not just anyone we feel like.

Of course, far away from a bubonic plague…

Why Is This Year's Flu So Dangerous for Young Adults?

See here
link

Amicalement
Armand

No, public health agencies have pretty well-defined powers to quarantine people if they pose a threat to the public's health. My agency has quarantined drug-resistant TB cases for up to a year (and paid for their room and board)…

Yes, I once managed to shut down a busy port for 48 hours that way….

In many ways our reliance and faith in modern medicine makes us somewhat complacent. We talk about flu as somewhat more annoying than a cold. We seem to forget that less than 100 years ago in 1918 the great flu epidemic wiped out large quantities of the world population, rivalling the first world war in its ability to kill people.

quote en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1918_flu_pandemic‎:-

"The global mortality rate from the 1918/1919 pandemic is not known, but an estimated 10% to 20% of those who were infected died. With about a third of the world population infected, this case-fatality ratio means 3% to 6% of the entire global population died.[31] Influenza may have killed as many as 25 million people in its first 25 weeks. Older estimates say it killed 40–50 million people, while current estimates say 50–100 million people worldwide were killed."

So it doesn't need to be the black death, just a virus our drugs can't handle.

"My (limited) understanding is that with overuse of anti-biotics, and the widespread use of stuff like anti-bacterial soaps and cleaners, we've been killing off the weak bacteria and leaving plenty of room for the resistant ones to breed."

Right.
Sooo…we're going to extend the "5-second Rule" to 5 minutes or 5 hours to allow our moribund immune systems to get a better workout, m'kay?

Well certain strains of bubonic plague are still with us – it supposedly shows up in the American Southwest from time to time. I think a number of posters have the key issues. Virulence issues remain a key factor as does the vector by which the pathogen spreads. Virulence includes the potential that the host can fight off the pathogen (eg, fatality rate) as well as the amount of time the pathogen is active in the host. Bubonic plagues was rather fast acting IIRC and had a high fatality rate. Many hemorrhagic diseases like Ebola are notorious for their virulence, but I believe they haven a high burn out factor due to short time windows – if the diseased population is contained. Bubonic plague is also virulent, but tends to stay around given that it is easily carried by fleas which maintain a disease reservoir that is not easily removed.

Flu is a critical problem in that it uses a various opportunistic method for spreading by being present in bodily fluids like saliva and mucus. This makes it easy to spread. It also has a lower mortality rate, so there is a higher likelihood it can spread. In general it is an evolutionary advantage to not kill off your transmission vector too often while spreading.

So, the question is one of how we see virulence and infection rates. In the modern world I am much more concerned with viruses than anything else given their high rate of adaptability – the concern for me is that a viral disease reaches a point where it balances virulence and transmission rates – e.g. Takes weeks to kill, easily spread through casual contact, and does not cause symptoms at first while it is spreadable. I have to wonder if some one found a way to engineer a bug just like that …