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People in Madagascar dig up their dead relatives to dance. The corpses don't seem to be very lively partners, but they're very good at taking some of the living back to their shadowy realm. It's plague, folks, the pneumonic form that infects people just by breathing on them. The death toll is only 120 so far, but health warnings have been issued in in nine other countries including South Africa, a country which still sees significant contact with Europe.
Plague once reduced the population of Europe by a third; the bubonic form, far less virulent than the pneumonic, was responsible. Agoraphobics and eremites shouldn't have too much trouble with this, but the compulsively gregarious sheeple could die in flocks. Think what an infected terrorist could do. I can easily envision a scenario that resembles a war with zombies.
We went through all this with ebola, a couple years back. They brought infected people here to the US for treatment. Nothing happened. We went through this with anthrax, back in 2001, and that was weapons-grade. It takes more than the presence of a pathogen for there to be a pandemic.
Pandemics occur because the population has grown too large ("exceeded the carrying capacity" of the area where they live) because the food supply or quality thereof, has declined to the point where it does not meet basic sustenance requirements. This could be due to severe weather disruptions of the crops for a couple years. This is usually called a "famine".
Something has to occur to weaken the population. This has to occur first. Otherwise, you may get a death here or there from a pathogen, but it does not decimate the population, because it is healthy. A healthy population does not succumb to a pathogen to the extent that it becomes a pandemic. There's a reason these things occur in Africa.
Of course, if a corporate entity has an agenda, say mass forced vaccinations to increase its profits, then yes, there will be talk of various infectious diseases as "pandemics". What occurs in Africa does not occur in the US. The population here is too healthy, in general.
We went through all this with ebola, a couple years back. They brought infected people here to the US for treatment. Nothing happened. We went through this with anthrax, back in 2001, and that was weapons-grade. It takes more than the presence of a pathogen for there to be a pandemic.
Pandemics occur because the population has grown too large ("exceeded the carrying capacity" of the area where they live) because the food supply or quality thereof, has declined to the point where it does not meet basic sustenance requirements. This could be due to severe weather disruptions of the crops for a couple years. This is usually called a "famine".
Something has to occur to weaken the population. This has to occur first. Otherwise, you may get a death here or there from a pathogen, but it does not decimate the population, because it is healthy. A healthy population does not succumb to a pathogen to the extent that it becomes a pandemic. There's a reason these things occur in Africa.
Of course, if a corporate entity has an agenda, say mass forced vaccinations to increase its profits, then yes, there will be talk of various infectious diseases as "pandemics". What occurs in Africa does not occur in the US. The population here is too healthy, in general.
I agree with you in general, but I must add that there are plague deaths every year in this country. The victims are usually outdoors folks who are healthy and fit.
Sure, but people still die of infection. Peumonic plague has a far higher mortality rate than bubonic. The latter, far more common, kills people in this First World country every year.
We went through all this with ebola, a couple years back. They brought infected people here to the US for treatment. Nothing happened. We went through this with anthrax, back in 2001, and that was weapons-grade. It takes more than the presence of a pathogen for there to be a pandemic.
Pandemics occur because the population has grown too large ("exceeded the carrying capacity" of the area where they live) because the food supply or quality thereof, has declined to the point where it does not meet basic sustenance requirements. This could be due to severe weather disruptions of the crops for a couple years. This is usually called a "famine".
Something has to occur to weaken the population. This has to occur first. Otherwise, you may get a death here or there from a pathogen, but it does not decimate the population, because it is healthy. A healthy population does not succumb to a pathogen to the extent that it becomes a pandemic. There's a reason these things occur in Africa.
Of course, if a corporate entity has an agenda, say mass forced vaccinations to increase its profits, then yes, there will be talk of various infectious diseases as "pandemics". What occurs in Africa does not occur in the US. The population here is too healthy, in general.
Tell all that to the nurses that caught Ebola here in the US from taking care of those patients that were transferred here. Or the business and professional people that caught SARS in an upscale Hong Kong hotel before spreading it around the Far East. Unfortunately, there are now emerging diseases like Ebola, Marburg, SARS, Hendra, and MERS, that can kill anyone, not just a starving population, which are readily spread from person to person, which are viral and have no vaccines or primary treatment, which have a history of infecting health care workers, and/or mortality rates of >30%, and which cannot be eradicated due to animal reservoirs, usually bats. We are at far greater risk of succumbing to a pandemic now than at any time since the Spanish flu due to the much increased mobility of the world population spreading these diseases around.
Pneumonic plague is no joke. Easily spread and near 100% fatality rate if left untreated. If antibiotics are administered within 24 hours of infection the mortality rate drops to 5-20%. Still that's going to kill a decent amount of people.
Every decent survivalist should have antibiotics on hand. Where do you get antibiotics without a prescription? If there was ever a global pandemic there could be a shortage fast and then you'd be SOL. It would be best to stock up but you'd have to continually discard due to shelf life.
Tell all that to the nurses that caught Ebola here in the US from taking care of those patients that were transferred here. Or the business and professional people that caught SARS in an upscale Hong Kong hotel before spreading it around the Far East. Unfortunately, there are now emerging diseases like Ebola, Marburg, SARS, Hendra, and MERS, that can kill anyone, not just a starving population, which are readily spread from person to person, which are viral and have no vaccines or primary treatment, which have a history of infecting health care workers, and/or mortality rates of >30%, and which cannot be eradicated due to animal reservoirs, usually bats. We are at far greater risk of succumbing to a pandemic now than at any time since the Spanish flu due to the much increased mobility of the world population spreading these diseases around.
Do you even understand the definition of the word "pandemic"??
I would never make light of the illness or deaths of health-care workers, or anyone who succumbs to an infectious disease. But the examples you gave are NOT pandemics. A pandemic is an event that occurs widely over a large area, country, or the world and affects an unusually large number of people.
It has nothing to do with how it is spread, the mortality rate, or whether there are vaccines for it.
Despite world travel, NO pandemic has resulted from any of the diseases you mentioned. Why not? Because the populations in developed countries are too healthy as a group, for mass infection to occur. That does not mean that a few individuals within that group won't be infected, it just means that nowhere near enough of them will be infected to call it a "pandemic".
Something has to weaken the population first, before a pandemic can take place. That's NOT my opinion.
I continue to doubt that US nurses who caught Ebola from international patients would agree that "nothing happened."
And yes, I understand the word pandemic very well, and I never said those examples were pandemics. Please reread what I wrote. What I did say is that there are now EID's out there that place the world's population at much greater risk of pandemics due to the considerations I listed, and that contracting those diseases does not require pre-existing malnutrition, just contact with someone who is infected. Yes, personal factors like malnutrition, coexisting diseases, and patient age, can influence the course of the disease, but they're not prerequisites. The only reason that those diseases have been stopped in their tracks is due to the efforts of under-funded, under-staffed, and under-supplied international health agencies, whose work has now become even more difficult due to certain countries that don't want to acknowledge they have a problem until the proverbial cat is out of the bag.
Claiming that pandemics have nothing to do with mode of transmission or preventative measures is uninformed. The WHO's website has a lot of information on many contagious diseases, including potential influenza pandemics, and the very first thing they say about that particular disease is that the severity of a flu pandemic is influenced primarily by the virulence of the viral strain, not malnutrition. There's a lot of good information on that site.
PLAGUE - . A highly infectious epidemic disease, especially one with a high rate of fatality; a pestilence.
PESTILENCE - A usually fatal epidemic disease, especially bubonic plague.
EPIDEMIC - Spreading rapidly and extensively by infection and affecting many individuals in an area or a population at the same time.
PANDEMIC - (Medicine) Epidemic over a wide geographic area and affecting a large proportion of the population.
QUARANTINE - (Medicine) a period of isolation or detention, esp of persons or animals arriving from abroad, to prevent the spread of disease, usually consisting of the maximum known incubation period of the suspected disease.
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