This could be a terrorist plan to spread the highly infectious disease throughout the Western nations by having these infected people (who are contagious) infect the populations they are in...
I’ve heard that they were experimenting with that idea...
Is there a vaccine?
A fitting plan for their 10th Century mentality.
But in western countries there is readily available and effective treatment (if the illness is detected soon enough). This is not true for a lot of countries where terrorists originate. Such a plan might seriously backfire, decimating the ranks of potential recruits.
The question is, how well would it spread today in a modernized western country?
A problem in 12th century Europe was they did not know the cause, they did not know the organism, and they did not have anti-biotics.
The cause were rats which were carrying infected fleas from trade ships. There was also sanitary problems back then. We don’t typically have rats running through our homes. In the west, we keep the rat population restrained with traps and poison. Flas are also bombed with chemicals. We know what symptoms for hospitals to look for which activate quarantine procedures. And we also have anti-biotics that can cure the disease. The original strain is not yet resistant to anti-biotics.
Of course, there can be a serious problem if this were to hit a 3rd world country.
But it is not likely you will have an epidemic anywhere near as severe as Europe experienced in the 12th century. But the fear caused by any outbreak at all would do the job the terrorists want it to do.
It will boomerang back at them. Western countries are way healthier, have better nutrition, have lots of medical facilities and antibiotics, and public sanitation, rat poison on every shelf and flea killer too for that matter, we also bath rather frequently and launder our clothes..
Muslim countries have bad health, bad nutrition, tons of other endemic diseases that reduce their immune system and much fewer medical resources, poor personal hygeine, poor public sanitation and fewer rat and flea killing options.
Much harder to get it vectored into a healthy and clean population than it is to vector it in to a filthy camp full of filthy undernourished men.
It’s not like bubonic plaque and it’s vectors don’t exist in America. Yet somehow cases are few and isolated (usually skid row bums and spelunkers (bat fleas are a vector).
“heard that they were experimenting”
That was my thought when I first read this. What if they were experimenting with a bio weapon and it was accidently released?
These are powerful weapons and if they actually did have them, we might expect that some of their own would be infected by mistake.
Any thoughts?
> This could be a terrorist plan to spread the highly infectious disease throughout the Western nations by having these infected people (who are contagious) infect the populations they are in...
> I’ve heard that they were experimenting with that idea...
Not likely. Plague responds to antibiotics very well. I can state from first hand experience that plague is a very painful and nasty thing to experience.
I was hospitalized with plague while in Viet Nam. In 23 days I went from 185# to 115#. The doctors told me that the hardest thing was that none of them had ever see a case of plague and I was being treated for everything but plague. Once they made a proper diagnosis I got better very quickly.
Plague is probably a poor choice as a terror weapon. It isn’t transmitted person-to-person but requires an intermediate host.