Beijing hospitals are treating two people for plague. It's not the bubonic plague. It is the much deadlier pneumonic plague.
Plague is caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis and can arise in three forms – a lung infection, known as pneumonic plague; a blood infection, known as septicemic plague; and a form that affects the lymph nodes, called bubonic plague.
The latter form is perhaps the most famous, and was behind several pandemics including the Black Death of the late middle ages, which is estimated to have killed up to 60% of the European population.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the US, plague typically spreads to humans who have handled an infected animal or who have been bitten by a flea hosted by an infected animal. However, in the case of pneumonic plague it can be spread when an infected person coughs. Pneumonic plague is highly contagious and is fatal if not treated quickly with antibiotics.
I guess it is a natural way to deal with a climate crisis by dealing a majour blow to the contributors. Decimate the population by some 60% and the demand for fossil fuels will surely be decreased.
ReplyDeleteOn my gloomier days ...
ReplyDeleteafter reading Mound and others on climate change and all the related environmental crises ...
I'd say that "Decimate the population by some 60% " is a soft landing.
Along with the continuing enviro collapse,even a 3% drop would upend the growth-at-any-cost economics and could trigger a plunge that goes far beyond 60%. One of Lovelock's predictions was the potential survival of a few human enclaves in the hundreds of millions: large enough to sustain a educational/industrial base.
Archaeology shows that early human's populations were up and down due to climate in Africa over millenia. Their number may have been , at one time , as few of 400 . Each of these extinctions can be seen as evolutionary windows, through which our ancestors climbed .
ReplyDeletePlagues and epidemics are nasty events to live through, but most of the population does live and the ones that live are inoculated from further infection from that particular problem.
ReplyDelete"Plagues and epidemics are nasty events to live through" and a bit nastier yet for those who don't.
NPoV, it's coming on faster than even the science types had imagined. We're told that climate change isn't linear and that may be a best case scenario because it suggests we may have pauses, periods of calm, in which we can regroup and, hopefully, be wise enough to seize the opportunity to prepare for what comes next.
ReplyDeletelooking for a plan? looking for a plan? didn't we have a SARS problem some years ago. what was the plan there? oh, right there wasn't one. Legionaires disease.......
ReplyDeleteif we have something like this make it into Canada, my suggestion, stay home. Our hospitals can't even handle the usual numbers of sick, injured and dying in this country. If suddenly there were several thousand extra seriously ill they would simply be dying. the first to die would be patients in hospitals because when there is a big flu out break in this country, the medical systems still have those people go to the E/R instead of another facility established to treat flu with staff specially dressed for the event. We may not even have sufficient drugs on hand and the lack of medical staff in this country is not a good thing. I would expect various doctor associations would be fighting with the government to ensure no "sudden hires" were brought in to treat the sick.
In the public library I frequent people routinely cough and sneeze right on the keyboard of the computers.
ReplyDeleteI'm probably still the only patron who ever things to lay down a tissue (a Wendy's napkin, to be exact) when I go on to catch my coughs, sneezes, and runny nose.
...and this is in the "first-world" U.S. of A.