Comment by kgeist
5 hours ago
Wikipedia says: "in the United States, infections occasionally occur in rural areas, where the bacteria are believed to circulate among rodents." A few years ago a boy in Russia contracted the plague after interacting with a wild marmot, he was treated successfully without any problems. I think this news is overblown, because everyone immediately pictures 14th century Europe
You should read up on the long history of Russian Biological War programs. Fascinating stuff. They came up with some insane versions of plague.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_biological_weapons_prog...
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/rr/rr7003a1.htm?
In a similar vein, I highly recommend Annie Jacobsen's recent book, Biological War: A scenario. It dives into the Soviet/Russian biological weapons programs and discusses facilities such as the Vector Institute (State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology) located in Koltsovo, Siberia. Interestingly enough, the scenario follows a lab leak of weaponized plague at this research facility... having read the book it was rather shocking to see this headline.
She was interviewed on Breaking Points today https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvVRnh3JVGQ&list=PLdOud06Yw7...
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Funnily enough the reason why virology therapy (something the Soviets did a lot of research in cuz they didn't have good antibiotics and biotech/pharma) hasn't seen much success at scale is precisely because the body's immune system adapts too quickly. Maybe we will see more success now with AI but it will be a cold day in hell before the powers that be let any garage biohacker have access to LLMs trained on this sort of information.
I saw a post about this on Reddit this morning. Haven't looked into it further, but people were claiming that there are versions of this plague that have been modified to release other toxins. It's effectively a bioweapon: they cure you for the plague, which kills you with the poison it contained.
There are some that had been modified to release endorphins!
>"When we first heard Soviet scientists were inserting the endorphin gene [for euphoria] into plague," says Dr. Henry Heine, a former U.S. Army bacteriologist, "we were appalled. That they would purposefully engineer the Y. pestis bacteria to behave this way... to make you want to go out and socialize... this was some horrifying stuff."
> . . .
> Former assistant secretary of defense Andy Weber agrees. "I grew up thinking Reagan’s phrase ‘Evil Empire’ was an exaggeration," he tells us. "Then I learned what the Russians were doing [with biological warfare]." He pauses for effect. "It was evil."
The accounts are from Annie Jacobsen's notes in "Biological War".
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Yep. And this is a lab that was reportedly doing gain-of-function research.
Indeed. I wonder how much work it would be to make this antibiotic resistant. Then the Russians develop some bacteriophage that infects and kills the bacteria as their own cure.
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The phrase "gain-of-function research" has acquired almost magical properties on the Internet. You can do literally anything you want to a pathogen with it.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_biological_weapo...
People just dramatically updated their priors since Covid. We went from pandemics are a problem of previous centuries to any new outbreak might be a pandemic.
The world is far more connected logistically before. Yes, we have modern medicine, but many people reject it. So, the priors-updating was probably both overdue, but maybe also overblown.
> Yes, we have modern medicine, but many people reject it
Yea you are definitely right about that. In Africa (specific countries I can’t currently recall) attempts at vaccination programs for example are often met with hostility or suspicion or even some people believing a vaccine causes the disease.
There was also vaccine skepticism during the COVID-19 pandemic in countries like China which refused first-to-market western vaccines out of fear and suspicion. It’s tragic all around.
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Tbf Covid was unique in that it was a virus capable of airborne transmission while being asymptomatic and also it can be fatal without killing too quickly. That's extremely unusual. Even more rare, some people never showed symptoms or the symptoms were so mild so it was unclear if it was Covid at all.
Hemorrhagic fevers (including Ebola), for example, are incredibly deadly but that really limits their ability to spread. You still have to be diligent but there's a reason why Ebola has been contained to parts of Africa the the virus seemingly spreads from animals to humans every now and again, starting another local outbreak. But it's never spread globally and it's unlikely to.
Probably the last comparable disease to Covid was the Spanish flu in terms of its ability to spread and that was over 100 years ago. It's worth noting that the Spanish flu could also spread asymptomatically, which also explains it's impact to a large degree. Pretty much every modern influenza variant is a derivative of the Spanish flu, which also tells you something about what tends to happen to novel diseases.
Y pestus is a bacteria, not a virus. We now have antibiotics that could likely combat it, which was obviously something that didn't exist in medieval Europe. Back then it wasn't at all clear that diseases spread by microorganisms at all. Plus, rodents were key to that spread and that's a far smaller problem now.
The nightmare scenario is probably some deadly variant of measles because measles is so incredibly contagious, probably more than any other disease I can think of. It can survive airborne for a very long time and in the modern era we've traced outbreaks of tens of thousands of cases to one single person. But the ability of measles to survive outside a host is also (luckily) incredibly rare.
> ”Pretty much every modern influenza variant is a derivative of the Spanish flu”
Not really. While it was true for much of the last century that many “seasonal flu” viruses were direct descendents from H1N1 Spanish flu, the H1N1 that caused the 2009 “swine flu” pandemic was a distinct strain combining new genes of pig, avian, and human flu origins. Since then, derivatives of that virus have replaced earlier ones as the most common circulating H1N1 types.
And right now the most common circulating influenza is actually H3N2 from a completely different (avian) lineage with origins in the 1968 pandemic.
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Unfortunately, you can force evolution in bacteria, fungi and viruses. There's more than enough examples of multi-resistant pathogens in all three families, especially in hospitals but also around agriculture (because they use stuff meant as a last-resort to promote animal growth or prevent animals from falling ill to the effects of overcrowding)... honestly between these and prions, I often do wonder how long we as humanity will be able to keep both hospitals and large-scale farming in existence.
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The disease is not the problem, people's reaction to it, is.
No pretty sure its the disease that kills people.
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I think you can safely agree that they are not mutually exclusive and both of them are problems. In this particular case, it was a 100% fatality disease in a gain-of-function lab. It is being handled extremely seriously by Russia.
Perhaps the Russian military is overreacting with the blanket quarantines, but the odds are more likely that they understand the nature better than anyone else.
Again, normal pneumonic plague approaches 100% fatality rates. This is potentially a weaponized form.
This is an "oh, fuck" moment.
You realize life is complex enough that two things can be true, right? That everything isn't either/or?
The reason we've haven't had more outbreaks of more diseases in the last century is because we had a lot of smart vigilant well-resourced people who very much felt the disease was the problem, and took steps to mitigate.
Classic late-stage civilization blunder is taking the fruits of civilization for granted. Sorry you're not aware of those things, but that's on you.
The bullet is not the problem, the squishy matter people are made of is.
Pneumonic plague seems bad enough, though its high mortality rate might limit spread.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumonic_plague
> Former head of the national public health agency Rospotrebnadzor stated that the disease the researcher died of is "most likely not the plague, but even if confirmed, there will be no spread of this disease
Very reassuring.
I would think the significance being the person was a lab worker. Someone getting hantavirus while camping in Yosemite is a lot less concerning than a lab worker death from pneumonic plague after having a test tube break.
I also think it's overblown. My fear is that this is a special form of the disease, modified by Russian researchers for who knows what reasons, and may therefore be a problem.
There was a recent fatality in Arizona.
'The “young adult male” died eight hours after he was admitted to the hospital, where doctors initially suspected he had hantavirus disease or bacterial pneumonia. Post-mortem testing confirmed Y pestis presence in his blood and lung tissue. It's Arizona’s first pneumonic plague death since 2007.'
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/plague/cdc-reminds-doctors-southw...
There are three ways the plague manifests: bubonic (Black Death, highly treatable), pneumonic [1] (what this researcher died of) and septicemic (gets in your blood–super nasty, but also doesn't spread easily).
Pneumonic is the most transmissible. There are also no commercially-available vaccines for it in most countries. That's why this is worth paying attention to. Not reacting. But keeping a close eye on. Russia being Russia we'll probably only learn if containment was lost from Mongolia or China.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumonic_plague
Or Ukraine, because they are not above biological warfare and will send the poor sods over the border.
My fear is that this is an enhanced virus that was being subjected to gain of function research, making it potentially much more dangerous than bog standard plague.
Bacteria in this case
Similar to the cruise-ship Hantavirus situation earlier this year. People see a disease they've never encountered and assume it's a novel pandemic. Really, it's just one of the rare cases where a westerner contracts a disease that's endemic to the global poor.
Most of people who are alive can relate to a very specific period in their lives, and it’s easy to imagine now what virus can do in terms of social life.
Are you discounting rural Americans as not being part of the global poor then? Or not real “westerners”? There have been roughly 30 cases a year in western states since the disease was first found here in the 90s
Infection by hantavirus is correlated with where you live, not socioeconomic status. It is endemic to parts of the high desert in the American Southwest and a background risk you accept by living there.
For example, Gene Hackman's wife, Betsy Arakawa, famously died from hantavirus. They lived in a wealthy gated community in Santa Fe.
30 in a population of 350mill is a ~1:10000000 chance of getting it. 900 or so cases in 3 decades. A cursory google search shows it's killed about 300 people since 1990, so roughly 10 a year, the equivalent of venomous snake-related deaths more or less, and that's because we have quick access to anti-venoms for most of the population otherwise the casualties would be far higher.
Treating that low number like a low number is not "discounting" rural US citizens. The US - all populations included - does not really live with the hantavirus in any real sense. It's incredibly rare. 10x as many people are struck by lightening annually in the US.
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Hantavirus is worth worrying about, though. If you have a mouse infestation, don't vacuum up droppings. Put on a mask, spray them with disinfectant, get them nice and wet, wipe them up 10 minutes later while they're still wet, then clean the area again.
Oh, was the hantavirus a product of a Russian gain-of-function biolab?
Are you seriously accusing an anti-plague institute that works on containing outbreaks of building bio weapons? Maybe try taking the propaganda with a healthy dose of salt
I mostly agree, but I am more concerned about a strain from a lab than the wild. Many times we study the worst strains, which might mean this has more potential to spread, higher fatality, etc.
My concern is that it is “the plague”.
The particular bacterium if infecting the skin is fairly treatable and mild with modern medicine, pneumonic plague is 100% lethal if not treated within 24h and utterly asymptomatic during the first 24h, it’s also airborne. Same bacterium but very different diseases..
> pneumonic plague is 100% lethal if not treated within 24h and utterly asymptomatic during the first 24h
But isn't the 24 hour critical window of treatment measured from the onset of symptoms?
No it is not, it’s from exposure. The moment symptoms show you are already a walking dead man, even advanced options like ECMO don’t work.
This was a "28-year-old employee at the anti-plague institute in the city of Irkutsk", she didn't catch it from a rat in a rural area.
Expect more cases of rare things, because more rain = more green plants, which means rodents will be able to breed many fold over. We saw something similar in the 90's
I think a lot of people don't realize the Black Plague is bacterial and we already have a cure for it. Most people getting anxious probably assume its like Covid and a cure would have to be developed.
Another thing is that the Black Plague symptoms are pretty horrible, enough to cause anxiety even if you know there is a cure.
I guess that’s true. I’ve literally had worse but I’m in a small minority so maybe discounting the effect of that experience.
I've got bad news for you. It may seem like a good thing that Y. Pestis is bacterial since we have antibiotics but remember that bacteria can become antibiotic resistant. You might say "no problem, that would only happen if there were a lot of cases and people weren't properly using antibiotics" and while this is true it is also possible to deliberately make Y. Pestis antibiotic resistant. "Who in their right mind would do a stupid thing like that?" you may ask, well it turns out the Soviets did and likely stockpiled large amounts of it with plans to deliver it in an aerosolized form over cities. Aerosolized particles are how you contract pneumonic plague which if you can't treat it with antibiotics is nearly 100% lethal in all cases. It can also be passed from human to human via coughing. So, here's hoping that this is just a rare case of wild type Y. Pestis that the lab worker somehow unfortunately inhaled and didn't get treatment for in time.
Answered this in another comment but my major fear if a bacterial plague like this became a pandemic would be our manufacturing output keeping pace with demand, not like during covid when it was not clear if it was even possible to create a cure.
Do you have a theory for why that researcher died?
I think it's pretty apparent from the news articles about it. She died of pneumonic plague, which is a fast-moving form of Yersinia Pestis infection that is roughly 100% fatal if first treatment occurs > 24 hours after symptoms start.
Why pneumonic plague? Pneumonic plague is the form of infection that occurs when plague bacteria are inhaled in aerosolized form into the lungs, or when septicemic plague (plague in the bloodstreams) reaches the lungs. Like, for example, when a test tube breaks. Her method of infection was a pretty textbook vector for pneumonic plague. Other cases have been caused when tissue samples of infected rodents have been splayed open, for example, or when blood from an infected person splatters the respiratory tract. Plague bacteria spreads pretty poorly otherwise, which is why the main vector for bubonic plague is flea bites.
If it's the pneumonia style (i.e. the infection is in the lungs, not the lymph nodes) you have to start antibiotics very quickly or it's basically 100% fatal. So it's treatable, but only to a point. The good news is basic masks and quarantine are extremely effective, so the risk of outright spread beyond the initial patients and very early health care workers is very small.
there is not information that's exactly the same bacteria and that drugs work. It might be novel one or modified in the lab. Even for flu we don't have general vaccine that works.
Yes, the fact that is the plague is less worrying than it is plague from a bio research lab that escaped. The only unfounded, non verified news i have read is that it can from collecting of samples, not post experimenting. But your guess is as good as mine at this point
And there might be a teapot on the other side of the sun.
It’s bacteria, antibiotics work more generally than vaccines for viruses do.
There are of course, antibiotic resistant bacteria but we still have some exotic antibiotics in our arsenal.
If anything for a widespread bacterial plague I’d be more concerned about our ability to produce enough antibiotics rather than _if_ we could develop a cure
Yes the bubonic plague was terrifying for the pre-modern old world but in the 21st century it is easily countered with common antibiotics.
Not in a gain of function lab. Or the lab worker, knowingly working on this specific pathogen, would probably still be alive.
So why is she dead?
Bubonic is different than pneumonic.
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What's your point?
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Prairie dogs are the main carriers in the US, and yet some people still want to give them protections because they are “cute”. They are literal vermin. Colorado is attempting to put a bag limit on hunting them, which is ridiculous given nobody is bagging their prairie dog kills. Because again, they are vermin.
They are food for coyotes and similar predators, no? They have a place in the ecology of the area.
They also destroy farmland and dig holes that cause hoofed animals to break their legs. The population got way out of control when their predators were mostly driven off by humans. And again, they spread bubonic plague. They are about as ecologically important as mosquitos. I understand the Venn diagram of HN users and people who grew up rural is infinitesimally small, but they are well known nuisance animals.
Come on, coyotes are classified as a least endangered animal and for good reason; they breed like crazy and eat almost anything. They are also a massive nuisance to livestock, a minor danger to people and they'll eat your cat or dog given half a chance. Culling prairie dogs would just mean their population would be slightly less booming.