Posted on 10/15/2015 4:54:02 AM PDT by WhiskeyX
Yep, an unusually wet year causes an explosion in the rodent population and those are the years the plague pops up. It has been that way long enough that the Navajo and Hopi both have stories about it passed down from the elders for many generations in Northern AZ, and NM.
I always heard the fleas on rodents and even rabbits carried it, my dad told us not to eat rabbits though some people did after a hard freeze.
This one has been there as long as anyone can remember and longer. No one has brought it back; it shows up after a wet cycle that causes population explosions of rodents, rabbits, and the like. My dad said it was the fleas, but not sure that is what the experts say now. I grew up in that area of Northern AZ where it shows so much red, but do not live there now.
There are things like TB and whooping cough that are being brought back in, but the plague has been there.
I’ve heard stories that the plague boomed in Europe as a result of superstitious departures from biblical Christian doctrine leading to a holocaust of cats, who were viewed as helpers of witchcraft with their mysterious reflective eyes. But the cats got their revenge in the burgeoning rat population which in turn increased the presence of that vector of the plague. And it was to be centuries before anything like antibiotics were understood.
Plus, it would be bad for Reynolds aluminum....
Yes, the fleas transmit the disease from the rodents to people.
Given that the disease is blood-borne and not many people get bitten by fleas, an outbreak like you describe is impossible.
Bacteria. But otherwise you are correct.
“Given that the disease is blood-borne and not many people get bitten by fleas, an outbreak like you describe is impossible.”
Evidently you failed to read the references at the provided links, especially the prior FreeRepublic Post #30 and its source:
The Mutant Genes Behind the Black Death
Quanta Magazine ^ | 10/6/15 | Carrie Arnold
Posted on ;PM by LibWhacker
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3346880/posts
Example:
[Quote]
“We found the very earliest state at which Yersinia pestis could cause respiratory disease. And as soon as it had pla, it could grow rapidly and cause pneumonia,” Lathem said.
Y. pestis didn’t just acquire pla; the bacterium also changed it. A chance mutation altered one amino acid in pla, which greatly increased its virulence by allowing the bacterium to penetrate more deeply into the body. Once there, it could make more copies of itself, making it more likely to be transmitted to another person, whether by coughing or by fleabite.
The findings change how researchers think about pneumonic plague. The ability to cause pneumonia was thought to have been a last-minute addition to the deadly repertoire of Y. pestis. Lathem’s work suggests that Y. pestis acquired pla, and thus the ability to cause pneumonia, very early. The mutation in pla happened later, transforming a bacterium capable of causing localized outbreaks of disease into the mass killer we know today.
“Our work is pointing to this mutation in pla as one of these Big Bang events in plague,” Lathem said. “It was already ready to cause severe pneumonia, and once it could cause invasive disease, everything could amplify.”
Plague continues to spread, although improvements in pest control, hygiene and antibiotics have dramatically decreased the size of outbreaks and the number of people who die from them. Yet the DNA of these bacteria carries the chilling reminder that the next major pandemic may be only a few mutations away.
{Unquote]
Every so often this bacterium undergoes a genetic change which turns on its ability to become a respiratory disease or pneumonic plague as opposed to only a blood borne disease. Once the disease becomes a pneumonic plague and it becomes capable of disabling the normal immune system defenses, it becomes very highly contagious through coughing, skin to skin contact, and other airborne means in a day and age when present day intercontinental transportation systems virtually guarantee transmission to the global population before the disease has any hope of being quarantined. The likelihood of a planeload of passengers being infected by the air recirculated through the aircraft cabin is very high.
While the difficulty in eliminating the disease throughout Nature is highly problematical, so is the death toll from the pneumonic and some other virulent forms of the disease which wipe out major fractions of the human population whenever they undergo the same genetic changes we see have happened before and certainly will happen again.
Sorry, not impressed. Two vectors, fleabite is established and verified. The second is a different strain and hypothetical. When the strain changes, the characteristics of the disease chance, in particular it can become too lethal or nonlethal.
“Bacteria. But otherwise you are correct.”
No, that is deadly wrong. It is the pneumonic plague that is the culprit behind the historical pandemics, and it certainly is not just a blood borne disease at all. It is a danger because it is transmitted through the air by coughs, sneezes, and not just by blood contact through fleas. Furthermore, it is a specific change in a gene/s which occurs on occasion which makes it extraordinarily capable of suppressing and/or circumventing the normal human immune responses which makes it so much more deadly than your run of the mill version of the pathogen you see in virtually all of today’s cases.
“The second is a different strain and hypothetical.”
There is nothing “hypothetical” about it at all. It is demonstrated by the forensic evidence retrieved from the corpses of the victims it infected and killed in historical times. The research shows the genetic mechanism which produces the more virulent form/s. The particular genetic changes are of a simple type and location which can be expected to reoccur from time to time. These particular changes disable and/or circumvent the human immune system and are therefore not going to be prevented by vaccines or inherited immune responses from prior exposures to the bactria. Because the disease does tend to kill the hosts so rapidly, it does not generally have an opportunity to adapt to an immune system it is already circumventing, so it does die off to a great extent; but it does not die off before killing off a plurality of the total human population during its occurrence. Bottomline, this pathogen is a clear danger to Human health in its occasional form as a pneumonic plague.
“But by then Plague had spread from the rats to the ground squirrel population. Now one can be exposed to the Plague anywhere in the western US.”
Sometime in the mid 90’s I was shooting ground squirrels in my area to try and reduce their numbers. That particular summer their population seemed to explode. Anyone who has vegetable or fruit crops in an area where ground squirrels are located knows the devastation they can cause. They are somewhat of a challenge to shoot, because as soon as they see a threat, they tend to disappear into their burrow, woodpile, or where ever they have made their nest, therefore requiring the need to shoot them at a distance. That summer, on numerous occasions, I’d pick one or two off with a .22 and then walk over to ensure that I’d actually hit them rather than them having just disappeared into the woodpile. What I repeatedly found was a rodent teaming with dozens or hundreds of fleas which had eaten away at their fur or skin, causing large areas of the rodent to be not only hairless, but the areas where the hair should be had turned black! Back then I didn’t have easily available access to information regarding plague, but I just guessed that with those signs they probably were infected. It was SO disgusting and I almost felt sorry for the dang rodents having to live that way, and that I was doing them (and myself) a favor putting them out of their misery.
The hard thing was to keep my dogs away from them. The dogs loved to dig in the woodpiles or ground to try and catch them, as well as run to the spot immediately after I would take the shot, in hopes of finding a treat to eat. But the fleas were always around the nests too. I had to keep the dogs well treated with flea protection and I would always bury to rodent immediately after shooting it. It’s not hard to see how this disease could rapidly spread given the right conditions. And if the disease made the jump to a more virulent version, we could see another modern day large scale outbreak. The region where all this took place was southwest New Mexico, which does have recorded plague cases. Heading directly north from here one starts to enter various tribal reservations where many people live in impoverished conditions, ‘living with nature’, increasing the likely hood of the disease spreading to humans. It’s also the same areas where the Hantavirus made its largest show.
If some devious ‘true believers’ and supporters of Agenda 21 were so inclined, and had the expertise and labs like they do at Ft Detrick and other ‘black’ facilities, they could release a virulent/weaponised version of the plague here and it would be difficult to ascertain if it occurred naturally or was created.
I’ll just stick with picking off ground squirrels when the opportunity presents itself. They like to stand on the tallest thing around their nest area and let out repeated loud chirps. I like to joke with fellow shooters that in ground squirrel language, that piercing loud chirp translates to “shoot me!” “Shoot me!” “Shoot me!” Which I happily oblige them on.
Because state and local governments want to keep all of the cash flow going to salaries and pensions. County health offices don’t care. That problem, along with flight from big municipal-like regulations and fees against building on private lots in the middle of nowhere (wealthy officials in counties), rodent populations continue to expand rapidly to potentially carry the plague farther and faster.
Why hasn’t the US eradicated the plague?
Cause Obama and Hillary are still alive?
The rodents don’t need to be extinct. They only need to be thinned out enough to stop the Plague from spreading from one group to another. We don’t need a prairie dog town that spans the whole Rockies. There’s also a vaccine.
The barrier to controlling the problem is that of factions in politics that don’t want funding to go anywhere but to their members. They don’t want landowners killing the rodents, either, because they’d rather play emergency-rescue for $10,000 per ambulance ride (ambulance only, multinational ambulance interests).
Public corruption through socialism (fascism) is the problem.
A couple of ways to thin your prairie dog population:
* In dry weather, they’ll climb into 5-gallon buckets for water, if they have a way. Fill buckets half full, and prop a board between the ground and the top of the bucket.
* Baits. Check at the agricultural feed stores. Grain baits should be available in bulk at low cost. Put baits in holes as recommended in the instructions or by feed store clerks.
* Small bore bullets, if you can afford enough of them. .22 LR hollow points are good. .17 caliber is great, if bore cleaning is done often enough. Some of the more accurate and higher velocity air rifles are great for avoiding making much noise.
Rat traps will work for the smaller, striped ground squirrels, but prairie dogs are often to large for such traps and require finishing off by hand (unpleasant).
If it’s thinned out enough they can’t spread disease from one group to the next then they’re thinned out enough they can’t spread genetic diversity between groups, and then they’ll have inbreeding problems, and then they’ll be extinct.
No, the barrier in controlling the problem is REALITY. The plague is endemic to every single rodent in the country. There is simply nothing that can be done about it. Might as well decide you want to make up down and the world fair. Not gonna happen.
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