WHO probes report of bubonic plague in Libyan town

[incarcerated]

Not to get too excited (Tobruk is a port town, and thus subject to a certain amount of rat traffic) but by way of general SA:
http://www.reuters.com/article/healt...55F42820090616


WHO probes report of bubonic plague in Libyan town

Tue Jun 16, 2009 10:20am EDT
CAIRO (Reuters) - Libyan authorities have reported an outbreak of bubonic plague in the Mediterranean coastal town of Tubruq, and the World Health Organization was sending a team to investigate, a WHO official said on Tuesday.

The cases -- approximately 16 to 18 have been reported -- would be the first in more than two decades in Libya of the disease known in medieval times as the Black Death, according to John Jabbour, a Cairo-based emerging diseases specialist at WHO.

"It is reported as bubonic plague," Jabbour said, adding WHO still didn't have "a full picture" of the situation.

"It is officially reported by Libya... Tomorrow, WHO is deploying a mission to Libya to investigate the whole situation, to see how many of the cases are confirmed, or not confirmed."

He said preliminary information from Libyan authorities showed 16 to 18 reported cases including one death, and that Tripoli had asked for assistance from the global health body.

Bubonic plague, noticeable by black bumps that sometimes develop on victims' bodies, causes severe vomiting and fever and still kills around 100 to 200 people annually worldwide. It can kill within days if not treated with antibiotics.

A plague epidemic of 1347 to 1351 was one of the deadliest recorded in human history, killing about 75 million people, according to some estimates, including more than a third of Europe's population.

That pandemic was thought to have begun in Asia, then spread into the Middle East, Africa and Europe.

Tubruq, where the new cases were reported, is approximately 125 km from the Egyptian border and was the scene of previous plague cases decades ago, Jabbour said. Egypt, already fighting to contain an outbreak of the H1N1 flu virus, said it had no reported cases of plague.

Rodents carry plague, which is virtually impossible to wipe out and moves through the animal world as a constant threat to humans.

Globally the World Health Organization reports about 1,000 to 3,000 plague cases each year, with most in the last five years occurring in Madagascar, Tanzania, Mozambique, Malawi, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The United States sees about 10 to 20 cases each year.

(Reporting by Cynthia Johnston; Editing by Matthew Jones)

[Utah Bob]

Actually here in the Southwest, plague is not all that uncommon. Researchers find it in prairie dog populations fairly frequently.

Plague in Black Tailed Prairie Dogs

[GratefulCitizen]

Originally Posted by Utah Bob

Actually here in the Southwest, plague is not all that uncommon. Researchers find it in prairie dog populations fairly frequently.

My friend has some land up around Norwood.
We frequently cleared prairie dogs from the pastures.
Plague was common and it also spread to the rabbits.

People who think that they're "cute" haven't lived among large populations.
(I grew up in western Colorado -- Cortez, Paonia, Grand Junction)

PD's are filthy, cannabilistic, plague-ridden, yard-and-pasture destroying vermin whose only useful purpose is target practice.

[Richard]

PD's are filthy, cannabilistic, plague-ridden, yard-and-pasture destroying vermin whose only useful purpose is target practice.

So are Ground Squirrels and Jack Rabbits!

Richard's $.02

[Utah Bob]

Originally Posted by GratefulCitizen

My friend has some land up around Norwood.
We frequently cleared prairie dogs from the pastures.
Plague was common and it also spread to the rabbits.

People who think that they're "cute" haven't lived among large populations.
(I grew up in western Colorado -- Cortez, Paonia, Grand Junction)

PD's are filthy, cannabilistic, plague-ridden, yard-and-pasture destroying vermin whose only useful purpose is target practice.

I was watching about a dozen of em down in in Cortez the other day in a patch of dirt right next to McDonalds. Would you like fries or plague with that burger?

[greenberetTFS]

Originally Posted by GratefulCitizen

My friend has some land up around Norwood.
We frequently cleared prairie dogs from the pastures.
Plague was common and it also spread to the rabbits.

People who think that they're "cute" haven't lived among large populations.
(I grew up in western Colorado -- Cortez, Paonia, Grand Junction)

PD's are filthy, cannabilistic, plague-ridden, yard-and-pasture destroying vermin whose only useful purpose is target practice.

GC,

Like Richard, I can say the same about "RATS"! Believe it or not the dump sites in the Chicago city limits,one especially on the SW side had rats as big as some cats and the junk yard dogs only attacked them in packs...... We of course went there for target practice with our 22's at night with flashlights to get a bead on their eyes which shined when light hit them......Scopes at that time were expense and we always said they were for pussies....

Big Teddy

[AngelsSix]

Some history on plagues. I think I watched a special on NatGeo about this, in increased periods of drought followed by heavy rain, we tend to see hemorrhagic fevers and plagues begin to climb. The increase in the RAT population and the increase in fleas have a lot to do with that.

Here's a neat article that talks about some of the history:

http://discovermagazine.com/2006/feb...tart:int=1&-C=

Megadeath in Mexico
02.21.2006
Epidemics followed the Spanish arrival in the New World, but the worst killer may have been a shadowy native—a killer that could still be out there.
by Bruce Stutz

Courtesy The Mexican Institute of Social Security

The Virgin of Guadalupe, shown in a 19th-century Spanish engraving, allegedly appeared during a 1531 smallpox outbreak and became the patron saint of New Spain.

When Hernando Cortés and his Spanish army of fewer than a thousand men stormed into Mexico in 1519, the native population numbered about 22 million. By the end of the century, following a series of devastating epidemics, only 2 million people remained. Even compared with the casualties of the Black Death, the mortality rate was extraordinarily high. Mexican epidemiologist Rodolfo Acuña-Soto refers to it as the time of "megadeath." The toll forever altered the culture of Mesoamerica and branded the Spanish as the worst kind of conquerors, those from foreign lands who kill with their microbes as well as their swords.

The notion that European colonialists brought sickness when they came to the New World was well established by the 16th century. Native populations in the Americas lacked immunities to common European diseases like smallpox, measles, and mumps. Within 20 years of Columbus's arrival, smallpox had wiped out at least half the people of the West Indies and had begun to spread to the South American mainland.

In 1565 a Spanish royal judge who had investigated his country's colony in Mexico wrote:

It is certain that from the day that D. Hernando Cortés, the Marquis del Valle, entered this land, in the seven years, more or less, that he conquered and governed it, the natives suffered many deaths, and many terrible dealings, robberies and oppressions were inflicted on them, taking advantage of their persons and their lands, without order, weight nor measure; . . . the people diminished in great number, as much due to excessive taxes and mistreatment, as to illness and smallpox, such that now a very great and notable fraction of the people are gone. . . .

[AngelsSix]

There seemed little reason to debate the nature of the plague: Even the Spanish admitted that European smallpox was the disease that devastated the conquered Aztec empire. Case closed.

Then, four centuries later, Acuña-Soto improbably decided to reopen the investigation. Some key pieces of information—details that had been sitting, ignored, in the archives—just didn't add up. His studies of ancient documents revealed that the Aztecs were familiar with smallpox, perhaps even before Cortés arrived. They called it zahuatl. Spanish colonists wrote at the time that outbreaks of zahuatl occurred in 1520 and 1531 and, typical of smallpox, lasted about a year. As many as 8 million people died from those outbreaks. But the epidemic that appeared in 1545, followed by another in 1576, seemed to be another disease altogether. The Aztecs called those outbreaks by a separate name, cocolitzli. "For them, cocolitzli was something completely different and far more virulent," Acuña-Soto says. "Cocolitzli brought incomparable devastation that passed readily from one region to the next and killed quickly."

After 12 years of research, Acuña-Soto has come to agree with the Aztecs: The cocolitzli plagues of the mid-16th century probably had nothing to do with smallpox. In fact, they probably had little to do with the Spanish invasion. But they probably did have an origin that is worth knowing about in 2006.

A portly man with a full, close-cut dark beard, Acuna-Soto is a devoted scholar of all things Mexican. As we maneuver our way through the crowded streets jammed with taco stands around the General Hospital of Mexico, which serves Mexico City's poor and where Acuña-Soto often visits when not teaching at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, he effuses about everything from pre-Hispanic Mexican history to the quality of street-vendor tacos ("stay away from the salsa; it's got nearly as much bacteria as human feces"). When he was younger and thinner, Acuña-Soto says—before he went to Harvard University to study epidemiology and molecular biology—he interned as a physician in rural Chiapas, traveling by burro to patients in remote mountain villages.
On our drive south to his home in Cuernavaca, he recalls how his life changed after his return to Mexico in 1984. "When I came back here from Harvard, there was a big devaluation of the peso. My grant proposals had been accepted, but there was no money."

What might a restless epidemiologist do? With an eye toward writing an encyclopedia of Mexican diseases, Acuña-Soto began combing Mexico City's archives, researching the most famous epidemics, those that came after the Spanish conquistadores arrived.
The Aztec kingdom then was the last in a line of Mesoamerican states that emerged, flourished, and then vanished over the course of 2,500 years. Borrowing from the preceding Olmec, Teotihuacán, Mayan, and Toltec traditions, the Aztecs studied science and cosmology, agriculture, engineering, art, even archaeology. They had no written language but, using colorful and evocative pictographs, kept voluminous records in books of animal skin, agave fiber, or bark paper. Most of these, evoking ritual blood sacrifices, horrified the Spanish, who set about destroying the kingdom's library.

Fortunately for Acuña-Soto, some Spanish priests worked with the Aztecs to recapture their history, language, and culture before it was lost. In volumes of often colorful codices, key cultural and natural events in their lives were recalled and redrawn. Droughts, snows, and floods, good and bad harvests, all were re-created on the pages of these codices along with the changing geopolitical landscape.

The census data from the time of the Spanish invasion were so good that Acuña-Soto found he could track the movement of epidemics from village to village across the country. Friar Juan de Torquemada, a Franciscan historian writing in 1577, described the wake of cocolitzli in typical detail:

It was a thing of great bewilderment to see the people die. Many were dead and others almost dead, and nobody had the health or strength to help the diseased or bury the dead. In the cities and large towns, big ditches were dug, and from morning to sunset the priests did nothing else but carry the dead bodies and throw them into the ditches. . . . It lasted for one and a half years, and with great excess in the number of deaths. After the murderous epidemic, the Viceroy Martin Enriquez wanted to know the number of missing people in New Spain. After searching in towns and neighborhoods it was found that the number of deaths was more than two millions.

Medical historians insisted that the cause of all this affliction could only have been a European disease. But Acuña-Soto says, "The more I read of the cocolitzli, the more I realized that the descriptions of the disease and its spread did not fit any recognizable epidemiological paradigms."

It made no sense, of course, that the Aztecs had invented a new name for smallpox. And Acuña-Soto noticed that previous researchers had to pick and choose among the disease reports to make them fit a diagnosis of smallpox or typhus. He also could not understand why Old World diseases would cause massive deaths 20 years and then 55 years after the arrival of the Spanish. "By this time," Acuña-Soto says, "those who survived the earlier epidemics would have had immunities or would have passed them on."

"Historians assumed it must have been smallpox; it must have been typhus," Acuña-Soto recalls. "But historians are not epidemiologists."

[Richard]

Rats!

Richard's $.02

[swpa19]

Richard

Rats!

Boooo