What would it take to get rid of the plague in the US? Would it ever be possible? Official: Plague likely killed biologist PHOENIX - A wildlife biologist at Grand Canyon National Park likely died from the plague through his exposure to wild animals that can carry the disease, the National Park Service said Friday. Eric York, 37, was found dead in his home Nov. 2. Following his death, about 30 people who came in contact with him were given antibiotics as a precaution. While authorities were uncertain about how York became infected, officials said that the biologist was at a greater risk to the sometimes-fatal disease through his exposure to wild rodents and mountain lions. Park Service officials initially said they suspected the plague or hantavirus, another sometimes-fatal disease endemic to the Southwest, because of York's interests and hobbies. Health officials in Arizona warned in September that the plague appeared to be on the rise and that more cases were likely after an Apache County woman was infected with the disease. While Arizona health officials say the disease appears to be on the rise in the state, CDC spokeswoman Lola Russell said plague cases weren't on the rise nationally. Plague is transmitted primarily by fleas and direct contact with infected animals. When the disease causes pneumonia, it can be transmitted from an infected person to a non-infected person by airborne cough droplets. Cases are treatable with antibiotics, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that up to 50 percent are fatal if the disease causes pneumonia. The Coconino County Medical Examiner has said York's lungs were filled with fluid and his body showed signs of pneumonia.
If we devoted the kind of resources devoted to AIDs I would think there would be a good chance of eliminating it, but it's just not worth devoting those resources to since it's not particularly common. I doubt more than a few people die of it in the US every year.
Plague is a virus that infects multiple species. There is no way to eradicate such a lifeform. A virus can be effectively eliminated in humans by developing a vaccine. If the virus is human-specific, it may eventually become extinct by running out of host organisms. This is what happened to smallpox, which was unable to jump species. I'm less certain but I think this is also what happened to poliomyelitis ("polio"), a dreaded scourge in my childhood until a vaccine was abruptly developed when I was about eleven. However, many viruses mutate quickly like bacteria and are able to jump species, like the hantavirus mentioned in the article, like many varieties of influenza, and like the plague. There is no way to eliminate them because they have too many choices of host organism and we can't find, capture and vaccinate every individual of dozens of species on the planet. If we can develop a human vaccine for the plague, it will effectively eliminate it. Some people won't be able to take the vaccine safely, it won't work on some people, and some people will not get it for various reasons including fear that they'll be in the tiny minority for whom it's not safe. Nonetheless, as the article implies, the "plague" is no longer an apt name for this organism since it is still around yet it is not an epidemic. The occasional hapless individual may die from it, but as soon as several people come down with the symptoms, long before it becomes an epidemic, doctors and laymen alike will begin to recognize them. Patients will be treated with antibiotics while it is still curable, and they will be quarantined to prevent contagion. Basic sanitation and public health principles reduced the scope of the plague long before modern medicine was developed. During the Dark Ages Europe was a filthy place in which people thought it was a sin to bathe, streets were cleaned annually by running a herd of pigs through town and converting garbage into pig poop, and most cities did not have what was arguably Rome's greatest invention: sewers. Simple cleanliness helped suppress the plague as the Enlightenment spread and people began to question some of fundamentalist Christianity's stoopidest practices. This was one of the many components of the antisemitism that defined Christendom for centuries. The Jews had a high regard for cleanliness and were quite fond of bathing. As a result, Europe's shtetls were not ravaged by the plague as badly as the surrounding neighborhoods... and the Jews were regarded as being in league with the devil.
An all out effort to get everyone vaccinated would be the way to go with the government leading the way by having the vaccine distributed by the military. Once the inoculations were administered the plague would be under control and in time eradicated.
If a person with the pneumonic form were in as large city, with contact with many people (some sort of job dealing with the public), the consequences could be very severe. http://www.bt.cdc.gov/agent/plague/factsheet.asp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubonic_plague You could easily become ill and spread the disease yourself within a day of exposure. And if you don't get antibiotics soon after you are symptomatic, you will probably die. If you never get antibiotics, you will certainly die. The CDC keeps a very sharp watch out for just this sort of thing. The plague hasn't had a serious impact in a very long time, but it still has the potential to be devastating.
I'm guessing Christians back then thought it was a sin to bathe because it involved getting naked. :shrug:
Malaria is caused by a parasite (Plasmodium spp.). The reason it is so difficult to treat is because it has a highly variable protein coat on it's exterior (which fools immune response), and it has a dormant phase that can last for years.
Then it's hopeless! Bacteria can mutate readily. Look at the antibiotic-resistant strains of tuberculosis that are already out there. Malaria is spread by a species of mosquito. We tried disrupting its breeding cycle in the 1940s by saturating the aquatic habitats in which it breeds with a powerful new insecticide that was not harmful to mammals. (Which is not easy, a clutch of mosquito eggs will hatch in the water in a frelling upside-down bottle cap.) Unfortunately it disrupted the breeding cycle of birds by rendering their eggshells too weak to hold up, and we nearly exterminated our national bird. Malaria was under control for a few decades as we wondered why the earth's avifauna were dying off. Now it's a major cause of death in tropical countries again. We defeated the plague with bonehead low-tech public health programs. Sealing homes against rats (it was carried by rodent fleas), keeping dogs and cats around to kill the rats, cleaning up our homes and our cities to reduce the rat population, and keeping ourselves and our food clean to statistically reduce the number of harmful organisms living on and in our bodies. Mosquitoes are a lot harder to protect against than rats. Nonetheless, there's a campaign to put mosquito netting around every bed in tropical regions, so low tech may once again be our savior. Don't ask me to explain Christianity to you. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! In the Dark Ages they had a big thing about water. People thought it was a sin to immerse themselves in water. No self-respecting European knew how to swim, or at least admitted it and did it in public. Remember that the way they tested people to see if they were sorcerers was to toss them in the lake. If they did not sink, they were in league with the devil. Obviously swimming was not a common skill or that procedure could not have become institutionalized.
Actually viruses mutate even faster (the influenza virus is a prime example), are not limited by metabolic considerations and there are no specific agents working against them in the first place. As such vaccines are likely only of limited use. For bacteria there are, besides vaccines, at least also antibiotics, though, as already mentioned, we are likely to lose the antibiotics race against bacteria.
Smallpox (and iirc polio) are unique in that they only infect humans. There is no animal resivoir so once you eradicate it in the human population, the disease is extinct. A massive worldwide immunization program managed to eliminate smallpox in this way. Smallpox now only exists in a few high security bio labs.
