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LAKE IN THE HILLS – Citizens infected with a fictitious pneumonic plague will line up outside Lincoln Prairie Elementary School on Saturday to help test the site as a medication dispensary in case of an emergency. The Lake in the Hills Police Department is carrying out the test as part of a grant from the McHenry County Department of Health for its emergency health plan. In case of a biological terrorist attack or widespread disease outbreak, the site would be able get medicine to the community, Lake in the Hills Chief of Patrol Services David Brey said. “This is just...

Ukrainian News Agency "Fraza" reported that, according to informed sources, "it has been confirmed 100 % Pneumonic Plague in Ukraine". The Agency asserts that "the head physician of the medical institutions has sent out an informal disposal - not to sow panic, to refute the information about the plague, and to speak only of swine influenza".

In last 24 hours, an unknown virus (presumed pneumonic plague) infected another 37 thousand and killed 12 more people. The authorities deny that this is pneumonic plague, and insist that people die from influenza, pneumonia and ARI. Meanwhile, an emergency message from the President of Ukraine to the international community to immediately help in the fight against the virus, only reinforces the suspicion that pneumonia and influenza is not the cause. "The current threat to national security of Ukraine, which we can not offset on our own, requires me to turn to our closest friends and strategic partners for emergency...

SHOCK! Epidemic of pneumonic plague in Ukraine? (updated at 05:39 pm) MIGnews.com.ua Ministry of Health has not established the exact diagnosis of the epidemic disease in the western regions of Ukraine. Health Minister Vasyl Knyazevich has given information about spread of diseases in the Ternopil, Ivano-Frankivsk and Lviv Regions today at the meeting of Cabinet of Ministers. According to the Minister, the World Health Organization is ready to render assistance to Ukrainian experts and the Ministry of Health in order to establish the cause of death and development of disease flu in the Ternopil, Ivano-Frankivsk and Lviv Regions. "We are...

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Public health officials are investigating the death of a University of Chicago researcher who studied plague bacteria and was found to have the microbe in his blood, university officials said on Monday. Malcolm Casadaban, who died on September 13, was researching a weakened strain of the plague bacteria Yersinia pestis. Because it is missing key proteins, the strain is not normally harmful to people. Medical center spokesman John Easton said Casadaban had the laboratory strain of Yersinia pestis in his blood, suggesting he had a form of the infection known as septicemic plague, which can kill even...

(CHICAGO) (WLS) -- There was word Saturday that the death of a University of Chicago scientist may be linked to a bacteria that causes the plague. The University of Chicago says there doesn't appear to be any threat to the public, and no other illness related to the case has been reported. The modified strain of "y-pestis" has been approved by the Centers for Disease Control for routine laboratory studies, and it is not known to cause illness in healthy adults.

Dog suspected source of China plague: state media 21 mins ago BEIJING (AFP) – A dog is suspected to be the origin of an outbreak of pneumonic plague in northwest China that has killed three people and left 10,000 under strict quarantine, state media reported. Ziketan, a remote town in a Tibetan area of Qinghai province, has been locked down since Saturday in an effort to contain the spread of the highly virulent disease. One patient was in critical condition and seven others were infected, most of them relatives of the first fatality, a 32-year-old herdsman, or local doctors, Xinhua...

BEIJING – A second man has died of pneumonic plague in northwest China, in an outbreak that prompted authorities to lock down a town where about a dozen people were infected with the highly contagious deadly lung disease, a state news agency said.

BEIJING (Aug. 3)- A second man has died of pneumonic plague in northwest China, in an outbreak that prompted authorities to lock down a town where about a dozen people were infected with the highly contagious deadly lung disease, a state news agency said. The World Health Organization office in China said it was in close contact with Chinese health authorities and that measures taken so far to treat and quarantine sickened people were appropriate. The man who died Sunday was identified only as 37-year-old Danzin from Ziketan, the stricken town in Qinghai province, the official Xinhua News Agency said....

Pneumonic plague is caused by the same bacteria as the bubonic plague, or Black Death, which is estimated to have killed 25 million during the Middle Ages. While bubonic plague is transmitted by infected fleas, the pneumonic plague is carried from person to person through the air, according to the World Health Organization. Patients typically become infected by being in close contact with someone who has the plague and is coughing or by handling contaminated articles. If left untreated, pneumonic plague can cause death within 24 hours of the onset of symptoms

Thousands of people have been placed under quarantine in a town in northwest China after a man died of pneumonic plague and 11 others were confirmed infected with the deadly lung infection, health authorities said. The 32-year-old herdsman died in Ziketan in Qinghai province, the provincial health bureau said in a statement posted on its Web site Saturday. It did not say when he died. Most of the others infected are relatives of the deceased and are in stable condition in a hospital, the bureau said. The town of 10,000 people has been placed under quarantine and a team of...

Bernalillo County Commissioner Michael Brasher will host a free, Plague Awareness and Prevention meeting at Los Vecinos Community Center in Tijeras on Tuesday, August 4, from 6:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. At least five cases of plague have been confirmed in New Mexico since the start of this year. Plague is a bacterial disease found in wild rodents that can be transmitted to humans, usually if they’re bitten by an infected flea. Health officials say that anyone living in Bernalillo County east of the Sandia Mountains is “always at-risk for plague” and that appropriate preventative measures should be taken. “We...

America today faces another “Black Death” that is as elusive and evasive as the plague of Europe. However, this plague does not attack the glands and rot the flesh, as did the Black Death, but instead it clouds the mind and hardens the heart. This plague is none other than the disease of liberalism.

An inventory of deadly germs and toxins at an Army biodefense lab in Frederick found more than 9,200 vials of material that was unaccounted for in laboratory records, Fort Detrick officials said Wednesday. The 13 percent overage mainly reflects stocks left behind in freezers by researchers who retired or left Fort Detrick since the biological warfare defense program was established there in 1943, said Col. Mark Kortepeter, deputy commander of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. He said the found material included Korean War-era serum samples from patients with Korean hemorrhagic fever, a disease still of interest...

An 8-year-old New Mexico boy has died and his 10-year-old sister was hospitalized after both contracted bubonic plague, the first recorded human plague cases in the nation so far this year. Plague is generally transmitted to humans through the bites of infected fleas, but also can be transmitted by direct contact with infected animals, including rodents, rabbits and pets. Symptoms of the bubonic form of the plague in humans include fever, chills, headaches, vomiting, diarrhea and swollen lymph nodes in the groin, armpit or neck areas. Pneumonic plague, which is an infection of the lungs, can include severe cough, difficulty...

Rats across Britain are evolving a resistance to poison that makes them almost impossible to kill, scientists have warned. Genetic mutations have produced a new breed of "super rat" with DNA that protects the vermin from standard toxins, according to Professor Robert Smith at the University of Huddersfield. Ratcatchers in Berkshire and Hampshire were the first to report that their poisons were no longer effective, which experts put down to increased immunity among the pests.

Australia ordered an investigation into a nursing home where elderly and bed-ridden residents were gnawed by a swarming plague of mice. An 89-year-old war veteran was found bleeding from bites to his ears, neck, head and hands after being attacked by the mice as he lay in bed at the facility in the northeastern state of Queensland. The old man was so distressed that doctors had to sedate him with morphine, said Ray Hopper, the local member of parliament.

...Rock music blaring from boomboxes has proved one of the best defenses against an annual invasion of Mormon crickets. The huge flightless insects are a fearsome sight as they advance across the desert in armies of millions that march over, under or into anything in their way. But the crickets don't much fancy Led Zeppelin or the Rolling Stones, the townspeople figured out three years ago. So next month, Tuscarorans are preparing once again to get out their extension cords, array their stereos in a quarter-circle and tune them to rock station KHIX, full blast, from dawn to dusk. "It...

Bangladesh's remote Chittagong Hill Tracts region faces a serious risk of prolonged famine and bubonic plague unless a ballooning rat population is brought under control, experts say. The UN's World Food Programme (WFP) began distributing three million dollars of emergency food supplies to some 120,000 people in the southeastern tribal area bordering India and Myanmar last May, after the rat population exploded. The rats -- some weighing as much as 1.5 kilogrammes (3.3 pounds) -- feed on bamboo forests in the hilly region. Dhaka University zoology professor Nurjahan Sarker recently visited the hill tracts and sounded the alarm over the...

TRENTON, N.J. — The frozen remains of two mice injected with the organism that causes plague have not been accounted for seven weeks after being discovered missing at a University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey facility in Newark, the university said Friday. The FBI investigated and determined there was no risk to public health or any indication of the terrorist link. -snip-

An al Qaeda affiliate in Algeria closed a base earlier this month after an experiment with unconventional weapons went awry, a senior U.S. intelligence official said Monday. (SNIP) AQIM, according to U.S. intelligence estimates, maintains about a dozen bases in Algeria, where the group has waged a terrorist campaign against government forces and civilians. In 2006, the group claimed responsibility for an attack on foreign contractors. In 2007, the group said it bombed U.N. headquarters in Algiers, an attack that killed 41 people. Al Qaeda is believed by U.S. and Western experts to have been pursuing biological weapons since at...

War On Terror: President Obama steps into office with awesome responsibilities, not least of which is protecting the U.S. from its enemies, foreign and domestic. From Algeria, we get a reminder of how tough that job is.For those who think the global war on terror is just a bad memory from the Bush administration, you might be surprised to discover it isn't. The threat is real — even more so, given that so many people are convinced it no longer exists. An overlooked news item out of Algeria puts to rest that notion. The report says that an al-Qaida affiliate...

An Al Qaeda affiliate in Algeria closed a base earlier this month after an experiment with unconventional weapons went awry, a senior U.S. intelligence official said Monday. The official, who spoke on the condition he not be named because of the sensitive nature of the issue, said he could not confirm press reports that the accident killed at least 40 Al Qaeda operatives, but he said the mishap led the militant group to shut down a base in the mountains of Tizi Ouzou province in eastern Algeria.

THE al-Qaeda cell wiped out by Black Death may have infected ITSELF while developing biological weapons, it emerged last night. The terrorists planned to wreak havoc on Western targets but fell victims to their own weapon, a leading expert on chemical warfare believes. The Sun revealed yesterday that Black Death, also called the Plague, killed at least 40 fanatics at a terror training camp in Algeria earlier this month. It was thought they caught the disease through poor living conditions in their forest hideouts. But Dr Igor Khrupinov, of Georgia University, said: “Al-Qaeda is known to experiment with biological weapons....

An al Qaeda affiliate in Algeria closed a base earlier this month after an experiment with unconventional weapons went awry, a senior U.S. intelligence official said Monday. The official, who spoke on the condition he not be named because of the sensitive nature of the issue, said he could not confirm press reports that the accident killed at least 40 al Qaeda operatives, but he said the mishap led the militant group to shut down a base in the mountains of Tizi Ouzou province in eastern Algeria. He said authorities in the first week of January intercepted an urgent communication...

That little attack of bubonic plague may have been a Biological Weapons screw up. The al-Qaeda cell wiped out by Black Death may have infected ITSELF while developing biological weapons according to some sources. The terrorists to infect on Western targets but fell victims to their own weapon, a leading expert on chemical warfare believes. The news broke yesterday that the plague killed at least 40 fanatics at a terror training camp in Algeria earlier this month. It was thought they caught the disease through poor living conditions in their forest hideouts. Well maybe not according to the Washington Times:

At least 40 al-Qaeda fanatics died horribly after being struck down with the disease that devastated Europe in the Middle Ages. The killer bug, also known as the plague, swept through insurgents training at a forest camp in Algeria, North Africa. It came to light when security forces found a body by a roadside. The victim was a terrorist in AQLIM (al-Qaeda in the Land of the Islamic Maghreb), the largest and most powerful al-Qaeda group outside the Middle East. It trains Muslim fighters to kill British and US troops. Now al-Qaeda chiefs fear the plague has been passed to...

Al Qaeda terrorists have been left fearing the Black Death plague after it wiped out at least 40 insurgents at an Algerian training camp, it was reported today. The horror disease, which killed 25 million people in medieval Europe, is understood to have been found in a militant’s body dumped at a roadside. Terror group AQLIM (al Qaeda in the Land of the Islamic Maghreb) was forced to turn its shelter in the Yakouren forests into mass graves and flee, it has been claimed. Now al Qaeda chiefs are said to fear the plague has been passed into other cells...

ANTI-TERROR bosses last night hailed their latest ally in the war on terror — the BLACK DEATH. At least 40 al-Qaeda fanatics died horribly after being struck down with the disease that devastated Europe in the Middle Ages. The killer bug, also known as the plague, swept through insurgents training at a forest camp in Algeria, North Africa. It came to light when security forces found a body by a roadside. The victim was a terrorist in AQLIM (al-Qaeda in the Land of the Islamic Maghreb), the largest and most powerful al-Qaeda group outside the Middle East. It trains Muslim...

ANTI-TERROR bosses last night hailed their latest ally in the war on terror — the BLACK DEATH. At least 40 al-Qaeda fanatics died horribly after being struck down with the disease that devastated Europe in the Middle Ages. The killer bug, also known as the plague, swept through insurgents training at a forest camp in Algeria, North Africa. It came to light when security forces found a body by a roadside. The victim was a terrorist in AQLIM (al-Qaeda in the Land of the Islamic Maghreb), the largest and most powerful al-Qaeda group outside the Middle East. It trains Muslim...

Plague has been confirmed in a cat in Los Alamos, and the state Department of Health is urging New Mexicans to keep pets from hunting and take other precautions against the disease. An Eddy County man who caught plague in January from hunting rabbits is New Mexico's sole case of human plague this year. Last year, New Mexico recorded five human cases, one of them fatal. Plague is a bacterial disease of rodents generally transmitted to humans through the bites of infected fleas, but can be transmitted by direct contact with infected animals. It was found earlier this year in...

Bacteria that can cause serious heart disease in humans are being spread by rat fleas, sparking concern that the infections could become a bigger problem in humans. Research published in the December issue of the Journal of Medical Microbiology suggests that brown rats, the biggest and most common rats in Europe, may now be carrying the bacteria. Since the early 1990s, more than 20 species of Bartonella bacteria have been discovered. They are considered to be emerging zoonotic pathogens, because they can cause serious illness in humans worldwide from heart disease to infection of the spleen and nervous system. "A...

One day last October, Eric York lugged the carcass of an adult mountain lion from his truck and laid it carefully on a tarp on the floor of his garage. The female mountain lion had a bloody nose, but her hide bore no other signs of trauma. York, a biologist at Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona, found the big cat lying motionless near the canyon’s South Rim. He was determined to learn why she died. Because the park lacks a forensics lab, he did the postmortem in his garage, in a village of about 2,000 park employees. Epidemic experts...

Cost of efforts could top $380,000. Boulder officials have finalized plans to relocate hundreds of prairie dogs inhabiting four city-owned sites, and to euthanize hundreds more. The plans call for spending as much as $388,400 on removing the rodents, capturing and euthanizing others, fumigating those left behind in their burrows and installing metal barriers so they don’t return. According to the 19-page document on the issue, prepared by interim City Manager Stephanie Grainger, about 500 prairie dogs need to be relocated ... “I’m not sure how we’ll end up doing it,” said Bev Johnson, a city planner familiar with the...

Hillary Rodham Clinton returned to Congress Tuesday for the first time since suspending her presidential campaign, to a loud round of applause and hugs from Democrats as they try to bridge the rifts left by a long, bruising presidential primary. The return of the New York senator had been much anticipated since she suspended her race for the White House earlier this month after Barack Obama clinched the necessary number of delegates to secure the party's nomination. "Glad to be here, my friends, glad to be here," she said as she entered the building, adding later: "We have a lot...

Wyoming officials confirm fifth case of plague found in mountain lions Friday, June 6, 2008 4:51 PM MDT Mountain lion hunters, the owners of domestic cats and others who may come in contact with mountain lions in Wyoming and other Western states are urged to protect themselves and their animals against plague. “Plague was confirmed in a mountain lion found dead in mid-April by a landowner in rural Johnson County,” said Todd Cornish, an associate professor in the University of Wyoming College of Agriculture's Department of Veterinary Sciences. Cornish said this is the fifth case of plague confirmed in mountain...

Scientists Discover Why Plague Is So Lethal ScienceDaily (May 5, 2008) — Bacteria that cause the bubonic plague may be more virulent than their close relatives because of a single genetic mutation, according to research published in the May issue of the journal Microbiology.Yersinia pestis, direct fluorescent antibody stain (DFA), at 200x magnification. (Credit: CDC / Courtesy of Larry Stauffer, Oregon State Public Health Laboratory) "The plague bacterium Yersinia pestis needs calcium in order to grow at body temperature. When there is no calcium available, it produces a large amount of an amino acid called aspartic acid," said Professor Brubaker...

GLOUCESTER'S ROMAN MASS GRAVE SKELETONS WERE PLAGUE VICTIMS By 24 Hour Museum Staff 29/04/2008 Archaeologists work to uncover the Roman mass grave in Gloucester during 2005. © Oxfod Archaeology A mass Roman grave, discovered in Gloucester in 2005, may have contained the victims of an acute disease of epidemic proportions, possibly plague. This is the startling conclusion to a new report by Oxford Archaeology and archaelogical consultancy CgMs, who have been conducting an 18-month programme of scientific study on the grave, which contained around 91 skeletons. The discovery of a mass grave of Roman date is almost unparalleled in British...

Italy: Plague victims discovered after 1500 years Rome, 10 April (AKI) - The remains of hundreds of victims, believed to have been killed in a plague that swept Italy 1500 years ago, have been found south of Rome. The bodies of men, women and children were found in Castro dei Volsci, in the region of Lazio, during excavations carried out by Lazio archaeological office. News of the extraordinary discovery was reported in the magazine, "Archeologia Viva". The victims are believed to have been victims of the Justinian Plague, a pandemic that killed as many as 100 million people around the...

Take a minute to think about the following: When was the last time you made a mathematical calculation in your head or by hand (yes which means not using a calculator)? Surely, some of you avoid math like the plague – especially when your teenage child comes around looking for help on their math homework – but you must admit that even in this compalculator era it comes in handy to be able to tally your bills in your head or figure out the miles per gallon you’re getting while driving along in traffic. Surely it seems reasonable to expect...

The chances of surviving the Black Death Why did some people survive the Black Death, and others succumb? At the time of the plague – which ravaged Europe from 1347 to 1351, carrying off 50 million people, perhaps half the population – various prophylactics were tried, from the killing of birds, cats and rats to the wearing of leather breeches (protecting the legs from flea bites) and the burning of aromatic spices and herbs. Now it seems that the best way of avoiding death from the disease was to be fit and healthy. Sharon DeWitte and James Wood of the...

Many historians have assumed that Europe’s deadliest plague, the Black Death of 1347 to 1351, killed indiscriminately, young and old, hardy and frail, healthy and sick alike. But two anthropologists were not so sure. They decided to take a closer look at the skeletons of people buried more than 650 years ago. Their findings, published on Monday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that the plague selectively took the already ill, while many of the otherwise healthy survived the infection. Although it may not be surprising that healthy people would be more likely to survive an...

LONDON — Plague, the disease that devastated medieval Europe, is re-emerging worldwide and poses a growing but overlooked threat, researchers warned on Tuesday. While it has only killed some 100 to 200 people annually over the past 20 years, plague has appeared in new countries in recent decades and is now shifting into Africa, Michael Begon, an ecologist at the University of Liverpool, and colleagues said. A bacterium known as Yersinia pestis causes bubonic plague, known in medieval times as the Black Death when it was spread by infected fleas, and the more dangerous pneumonic plague, spread from one person...

Mass Plague Graves Found on Venice "Quarantine" Island Maria Cristina Valsecchi for National Geographic News August 29, 2007 Ancient mass graves containing more than 1,500 victims of the bubonic plague have been discovered on a small island in Italy's Venetian Lagoon. Workers came across the skeletons while digging the foundation for a new museum on Lazzaretto Vecchio, a small island in the lagoon's south, located a couple of miles from Venice's famed Piazza San Marco (see a map of the Venetian Lagoon). The island is believed to be the world's first lazaret—a quarantine colony intended to help prevent the spread...

A plague carried around the world by travellers, pets and curious teenagers may show that experts have not taken everything into account when planning for an outbreak of disease, researchers have said. Luckily, the world involved is an internet game. The outbreak of "Corrupted Blood" indicates that specialists trying to predict what the next pandemic will look like might make use of a real-world laboratory - the culture of online gamers. "It really looked quite a bit like a real disease," Nina Fefferman of Princeton University, who worked on the report with her then-student Eric Lofgren, said in a telephone...

A Denver Zoo monkey has died of bubonic plague, apparently after eating a squirrel stricken with the disease, Colorado health and zoo officials said on Monday. Five squirrels and a rabbit found dead on zoo grounds tested positive for the flea-borne disease in recent weeks, Denver Zoo spokeswoman Ana Bowie said. Zookeepers on May 15 noticed the 8-year-old hooded capuchin monkey was lethargic, and the next day it was found dead in its enclosure. Zoo veterinarians sent tissue samples to a state laboratory where it was determined the animal died of the plague. The death was announced on Monday. Zoo...

Indian farmers braced for rat plague By Peter Foster in New Delhi Last Updated: 3:02am BST 04/05/2007 Nearly 500,000 Indian farmers are facing the prospect of famine as a plague of rats that strikes once every 50 years threatens to destroy their crops, rice paddies and village granaries. The flowering of a rare species of bamboo causes the rat plague Efforts to control the rodent plague in the north east Indian state of Mizoram have led the local government to offer a reward of one rupee (1.2 pence) for every rat tail delivered to the authorities. More than 400,000 rats...

DENVER - Six dead tree squirrels found near the Denver Zoo and City Park have tested positive for bubonic plague, the state health department reported Friday.Experts say it is unusual to find the disease in the center of a city. Caused by a bacterium, plague is transmitted from rodent to rodent by infected fleas. Humans can catch the disease through scratches, bites and coughs."The risk of Denver residents contracting plague is extremely low," said John Pape, an epidemiologist who specializes in animal-related diseases for the health department's disease control division.Symptoms in humans include high fever, fatigue, weakness and a painful,...

Source: Washington University School of Medicine Date: January 27, 2007 Disabling Key Protein May Give Physicians Time To Treat Pneumonic Plague Science Daily — The deadly attack of the bacterium that causes pneumonic plague is significantly slowed when it can't make use of a key protein, scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis report in this week's issue of Science. Scanning electron micrograph depicting a mass of Yersinia pestis bacteria (the cause of bubonic plague) in the foregut of the flea vector. (Credit: Rocky Mountain Laboratories, NIAID, NIH) Speed is a primary concern in pneumonic plague, which...

An Empire's Epidemic Scientists Use DNA in Search for Answers to 6th Century Plague By THOMAS H. MAUGH II, Times Staff Writer By the middle of the 6th century, the Emperor Justinian had spread his Byzantine Empire around the rim of the Mediterranean and throughout Europe, laying the groundwork for what he hoped would be a long-lived dynasty. His dreams were shattered when disease-bearing mice from lower Egypt reached the harbor town of Pelusium in AD 540. From there, the devastating disease spread to Alexandria and, by ship, to Constantinople, Justinian's capital, before surging throughout his empire. By the time...