I recall being on a road trip and was at the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains; was getting ready to camp at a random camp site and noticed a sign warning or squirrels that carry bubonic plague via fleas…
Scary..
kulahan 2 hours ago [-]
It’s not usually very bad. My wife used to do epidemiology in Utah, and the four corner states have a few plague cases every year. Very easy to get from prairie dogs as well. Iirc, prairie dog colonies are separated based on which ones have the plague and which don’t.
atomicnumber3 25 minutes ago [-]
When you say it's easy to get from prairie dogs, how exactly does that happen? Is it like, you're camping, and a prairie dog gets into your tent? How exactly does that people get exposed to a prairie dog?
317070 16 minutes ago [-]
It's not the prairie dogs themselves, but the fleas on the dogs. The carriers for the plague are fleas.
Lime disease has a similar relationship with predators that eat mice, so let's also keep an eye out for the owls and snakes.
ugh123 33 minutes ago [-]
> Iirc, prairie dog colonies are separated based on which ones have the plague and which don’t.
Do you mean 'naturally' by their own selection, or some external means?
afiori 8 minutes ago [-]
I read it as someone keeps track of it for public safety
Fire-Dragon-DoL 15 minutes ago [-]
What improvements do we have to survive against the plague compared to in the past? I'm curious to understand the difference
Beijinger 3 minutes ago [-]
I think the plague has not been an issue since it is very sensitive against penicillin. What is concerning is more the speed from diagnosis to death in this case.
LarsDu88 10 minutes ago [-]
Antibiotics. Yersenia pestis is a bacteria that can be killed by most antibiotics
RandomBacon 2 hours ago [-]
I knew someone (in the U.S.) who contracted the plague along with his wife. He survived but his wife did not.
According to him, about one person dies each year from it.
> Plague is a bacterial infection known for killing tens of millions in 14th century Europe. Today, it’s easily treated with antibiotics.
> The bubonic plague is the most common form of the bacterial infection, which spreads naturally among rodents like prairie dogs and rats.
southernplaces7 4 hours ago [-]
Nasty thing that. Bubonic plague became famous for killing nearly half the western world in the 14th century in just a few years, but for all its voracious destructiveness, the pneumonic variant left it in the dust in specific situations. I've read that in cities and towns where plague took on its pneumonic form instead of its bubonic variant, 80%+ of the local population would die in just days. In some cities struck by this, populations didn't recover until the 18th century.
southernplaces7 3 hours ago [-]
I think it's innately impossible for us now in the comparatively near-sterile, social safety-laden developed world of today to imagine such grotesque death happening so suddenly on such a vast scale.
The COVID pandemic, for all the fear and emergency measures it sparked mostly killed sporadically. In any average social group, family or community, one would hear of only a very small minority of people having actually died. It was, comparatively, a sort of kid-gloves pandemic in terms of pure clinical impact.
Compare that with hearing stories of a vast and utterly mysterious dying sweeping towards all that you know, only to suddenly hear one day of inhabitants in the outermost parts of your city falling like flies in the most disgusting of ways, and then being forced to watch the same thing you'd feared from rumor unfold before your very eyes to those you love, taking each of them in turn so terribly that you can barely bring yourself to even approach (let alone try help) these same people that you'e cherished since birth. This abyss of tragedy overwhelms you and all your senses before finally, just days later, you wake up with yet another exhausting morning to the discovery of nearly every single person you know being dead, and all the social tapestry that wove you together so richly across so many years now completely erased from your personal world. All this monstrous upheaval, in just a single week.
harryquach 2 hours ago [-]
This reinforces my belief that today is the best time in human history to live. Yes there is still pain and suffering but overall more humans live lives our ancestors could not begin to imagine.
suzzer99 20 minutes ago [-]
And yet Americans have never been angrier.
lazide 11 minutes ago [-]
Eh, people got pretty worked up in the ‘70’s.
Waterluvian 2 hours ago [-]
And we know this. We can measure it and reason about it. But good times breeds weak people and we’re well into the phase of people no-longer grokking why vaccines, civil government, democracy, floodplain management, etc. need to exist.
This social plague is proliferating and I’m not sure we really know how to fight it as it takes colleagues, friends, family, celebrities we once admired.
Same goes for preventative maintenance, handling technical debt or any action that keeps negative consequences at bay. It's a failure mode that's almost an inverse of loss-aversion; some people will start asking "Why are we investing in $ACTION, it seems unnecessary as nothing bad ever happens"
pixl97 25 minutes ago [-]
People don't understand why Chesterton's fence exists
MangoToupe 27 minutes ago [-]
> But good times breeds weak people
Yea I know a couple of people who watched their families and friends get chopped to bits with machetes and lemme tell you, they are not stronger for it. I would maybe rethink this idea. I suspect ignorance has always thrived.
deadbabe 2 hours ago [-]
You can’t fight it, you just endure, and one day you may die but hopefully others will carry on in a better world.
n3storm 43 minutes ago [-]
Eventhoug JFK Jr
askonomm 3 hours ago [-]
You should write a book, if you haven't yet. I'd buy it. Love the way you convey emotion with words.
"The author describes the progression of the disease, from the initial headache and backache, to the final stage in which Monet's internal organs fail and he hemorrhages extensively in a waiting room in a Nairobi hospital. "
Edit: Richard Preston, not Michael Chrichton. Not sure what I was thinking.
jameshart 2 hours ago [-]
Richard Preston, not Crichton.
Maybe you’re thinking of The Andromeda Strain?
literalAardvark 2 hours ago [-]
The Hot Zone was an awesome read. Highly recommended.
southernplaces7 3 hours ago [-]
Now that was a wonderful compliment. Thank you.
hibikir 1 hours ago [-]
In the middle ages they understood quarantine, but the fact that the disease was carried by fleas made it worse: It'd break containment unless the arrival was by boat, and you didn't let anyone disembark.
So even when warned (and people were warned) often the people bringing the warnings could spread the disease anyway.
2 hours ago [-]
hn_throwaway_99 26 minutes ago [-]
> Compare that with hearing stories of a vast and utterly mysterious dying sweeping towards all that you know, only to suddenly hear one day of inhabitants in the outermost parts of your city falling like flies in the most disgusting of ways, and then being forced to watch the same thing you'd feared from rumor unfold before your very eyes to those you love, taking each of them in turn so terribly that you can barely bring yourself to even approach (let alone try help) these same people that you'e cherished since birth.
My partner did his medical internship at UCSF in 1994. Your quote pretty perfectly describes what happened in gay communities in cities like NY and SF in the 80s and early 90s due to the AIDS epidemic.
roywiggins 2 hours ago [-]
> I think it's innately impossible for us now in the comparatively near-sterile, social safety-laden developed world of today to imagine such grotesque death happening so suddenly on such a vast scale
The Black Death was so big that people struggled to comprehend it at the time, too.
literalAardvark 2 hours ago [-]
Everyone I know lost someone to COVID. I almost croaked twice to it.
Idk where that "small minority" is but it sounds like you might not value your friends very highly.
Sure, it wasn't 80%, but still, it's not that isolated and I hate this narrative that it was a light cold.
sokoloff 2 hours ago [-]
The IFR (infection fatality rate: the chance of dying for an individual who contracted COVID) is under 1%.
That’s a small minority by any reasonable measure, especially in a thread comparing it to the plague.
literalAardvark 1 hours ago [-]
One could argue that the plague also has a low kill rate these days.
The IFR was only low because we could get all the infected to the hospital.
sokoloff 1 hours ago [-]
What?! I know hundreds of people who have had it, and only one I know went to the hospital. Zero died. I’ve had it three times. Zero hospital visits. One was “bad cold”; one was “mild cold”; the last was “would have never known I had anything if not for a complete loss of smell, which made me test”.
Where is this place where everyone who gets infected with C19 goes to the hospital or seriously risks death?
literalAardvark 49 minutes ago [-]
Who said everyone? iirc untreated IFR is around 10%
sokoloff 41 minutes ago [-]
You did: “IFR was only low because we could get all the infected to the hospital.”
literalAardvark 34 minutes ago [-]
Eh, ESL. I meant the ones who need it, obviously.
suzzer99 17 minutes ago [-]
I know a couple in Missouri who lost 5 family members between his and her side. All obese. I believe 4 of them died after the vaccine was available, but they refused to take it.
SoftTalker 2 hours ago [-]
I mean I know dozens of people who caught it and nobody died. Anecdotes don’t mean much.
literalAardvark 1 hours ago [-]
Everyone caught it by now, so you know more than that.
Doesn't mean it wasn't deadly during the initial wave.
fuckyah 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
throw310822 4 hours ago [-]
Yersinia pestis, the bubonic plague.
mplewis9z 4 hours ago [-]
You do know that both pneumonic and bubonic are caused by the same bacterium, right? They’re just different transmission methods.
throw310822 4 hours ago [-]
Indeed. I wrongly assumed it would be bubonic as it seems to be the most common form (and because it qualifies a bit the term "plague" which can be perceived as generic, I think).
lazide 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, many types of bacteria can cause ‘a plague’, but at least in the western world, only one was ‘The Plague’.
Probably anyway, there is some debate on that. But it’s pretty likely.
readthenotes1 4 hours ago [-]
You left one variant off, apparently:
"Plague occurs in three forms, bubonic, septicemic and pneumonic, depending on whether the infection hits the lymph nodes, bloodstream or lungs. Most US cases are bubonic, typically spread via flea bites from infected rodents. "
Given the discussion of the prairie dog die off, it's more interesting than it was mnemonic and not move on it for me fleas
marssaxman 3 hours ago [-]
Many years ago, I knew a family who named the three squirrels who regularly visited their back yard "Bubonic", "Pneumonic", and "Septicemic". The squirrels did not respond to these names, but the family sure did find it amusing to use them.
Waterluvian 4 hours ago [-]
Mnemonic Plague
People
Learn
About
Germs
Using
Epidemiology
isoprophlex 3 hours ago [-]
What a wonderful typo. Death by infected memories.
You might enjoy the movie Pontypool. I describe it as a zombie movie about linguistics.
2 hours ago [-]
Waterluvian 2 hours ago [-]
This is a solid short story prompt.
littlestymaar 3 hours ago [-]
I genuinely don't understand why this comment is downvoted.
carterschonwald 4 hours ago [-]
Bubonic
mcv 4 hours ago [-]
According to the article, they're all the same plague, but it manifests differently based on which organs it hits.
Apparently there's a couple of cases every year, but I've got to say that amidst the return of measles and various other diseases, the cuts in healthcare, this is not a great look.
Waterluvian 4 hours ago [-]
Apparently it’s very easy to treat, if you can and do seek treatment. Which is why the annual deaths are usually rural regions.
ginko 3 hours ago [-]
From the article:
>Symptoms often begin within a week of infection and may include fever, chills, swollen lymph nodes, nausea and weakness.
If I had symptoms like that I think I'd just stay at home and not visit a doctor yet. Certainly not within 24 hours of them showing up.
jll29 3 hours ago [-]
Mumps, a common kid's viral disease, has overlapping symptoms, so many people might follow a "let's wait and see" approach.
Also, medical practitioners may not immediately put on their bioharzard protection suite when someone walks in with swollen lymph nodes and nausea.
That's why it is important to take news of incidents and location of the occurrence into consideration, both as a patient and as medical staff.
SoftTalker 1 hours ago [-]
Mumps is commonly vaccinated against when children are very young. It’s one of the Ms in the MMR vaccine.
asyx 37 minutes ago [-]
It’s 2025 my guy. Can’t count on kids getting vaccinated anymore.
Canada obviously had only 1/10th the population. Your attempted connection to domestic policies is spurious.
Waterluvian 2 hours ago [-]
I think the statistical anomaly you point out is an incredibly worthwhile thing to explore. There’s something to understand there. But I’m not sure it directly supports or refutes any arguments about domestic policies, other than perhaps saying that domestic policy making does not have a 100% guaranteed desired effect.
There’s likely numerous other variables to explore.
rayiner 1 hours ago [-]
No, I’m agreeing that it’s not about domestic policies. That’s my point. OP tried to bring domestic cuts to Medicaid into the issue to make it sound like the measles cases in the U.S. have something to do with that domestic policy.
iJohnDoe 25 minutes ago [-]
In general, how do you get exposed to it? Hiking? Do people often get that close to prairie dogs? Hiking in Utah?
Animats 3 hours ago [-]
There's a vaccine, but it's old and not recommended for the general population.[1]
Lime disease has a similar relationship with predators that eat mice, so let's also keep an eye out for the owls and snakes.
Do you mean 'naturally' by their own selection, or some external means?
According to him, about one person dies each year from it.
> The bubonic plague is the most common form of the bacterial infection, which spreads naturally among rodents like prairie dogs and rats.
The COVID pandemic, for all the fear and emergency measures it sparked mostly killed sporadically. In any average social group, family or community, one would hear of only a very small minority of people having actually died. It was, comparatively, a sort of kid-gloves pandemic in terms of pure clinical impact.
Compare that with hearing stories of a vast and utterly mysterious dying sweeping towards all that you know, only to suddenly hear one day of inhabitants in the outermost parts of your city falling like flies in the most disgusting of ways, and then being forced to watch the same thing you'd feared from rumor unfold before your very eyes to those you love, taking each of them in turn so terribly that you can barely bring yourself to even approach (let alone try help) these same people that you'e cherished since birth. This abyss of tragedy overwhelms you and all your senses before finally, just days later, you wake up with yet another exhausting morning to the discovery of nearly every single person you know being dead, and all the social tapestry that wove you together so richly across so many years now completely erased from your personal world. All this monstrous upheaval, in just a single week.
This social plague is proliferating and I’m not sure we really know how to fight it as it takes colleagues, friends, family, celebrities we once admired.
This is a silly and regularly disproven trope.
For an extensive and approachable start: https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...
Yea I know a couple of people who watched their families and friends get chopped to bits with machetes and lemme tell you, they are not stronger for it. I would maybe rethink this idea. I suspect ignorance has always thrived.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hot_Zone
There's entire chapters of this:
"The author describes the progression of the disease, from the initial headache and backache, to the final stage in which Monet's internal organs fail and he hemorrhages extensively in a waiting room in a Nairobi hospital. "
Edit: Richard Preston, not Michael Chrichton. Not sure what I was thinking.
Maybe you’re thinking of The Andromeda Strain?
So even when warned (and people were warned) often the people bringing the warnings could spread the disease anyway.
My partner did his medical internship at UCSF in 1994. Your quote pretty perfectly describes what happened in gay communities in cities like NY and SF in the 80s and early 90s due to the AIDS epidemic.
The Black Death was so big that people struggled to comprehend it at the time, too.
Idk where that "small minority" is but it sounds like you might not value your friends very highly.
Sure, it wasn't 80%, but still, it's not that isolated and I hate this narrative that it was a light cold.
That’s a small minority by any reasonable measure, especially in a thread comparing it to the plague.
The IFR was only low because we could get all the infected to the hospital.
Where is this place where everyone who gets infected with C19 goes to the hospital or seriously risks death?
Doesn't mean it wasn't deadly during the initial wave.
Probably anyway, there is some debate on that. But it’s pretty likely.
"Plague occurs in three forms, bubonic, septicemic and pneumonic, depending on whether the infection hits the lymph nodes, bloodstream or lungs. Most US cases are bubonic, typically spread via flea bites from infected rodents. "
Given the discussion of the prairie dog die off, it's more interesting than it was mnemonic and not move on it for me fleas
People
Learn
About
Germs
Using
Epidemiology
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onzL0EM1pKY
Apparently there's a couple of cases every year, but I've got to say that amidst the return of measles and various other diseases, the cuts in healthcare, this is not a great look.
>Symptoms often begin within a week of infection and may include fever, chills, swollen lymph nodes, nausea and weakness.
If I had symptoms like that I think I'd just stay at home and not visit a doctor yet. Certainly not within 24 hours of them showing up.
Also, medical practitioners may not immediately put on their bioharzard protection suite when someone walks in with swollen lymph nodes and nausea.
That's why it is important to take news of incidents and location of the occurrence into consideration, both as a patient and as medical staff.
Canada obviously had only 1/10th the population. Your attempted connection to domestic policies is spurious.
There’s likely numerous other variables to explore.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00041848.htm