But a bacteria still gets “evolutionary credit” for its daughter bacteria which leave the host and infect another carrier, leaving the parent bacteria to die in their host. Whether that death is tomorrow due to the disease or 20 years later from an unrelated cause.
The ideal pandemic causer would be something not too different from how early COVID worked. After a host is infected, there’s a long period of nil to mild ambiguous symptoms while meanwhile the host is infectious as heck and the disease is being readily spread to others. Then, after enough days or weeks of incubation in the host, something changes phase and the disease rapidly becomes fatal to that host. At least absent effective medical intervention.
HIV worked that way too. At least before modern medicine had figured out both the disease and treatments. Once infected, the person was a carrier and fairly effective spreader for quite awhile. [IIRC the only thing slowing down HIV was that it was hard to catch absent certain pre-disposing factors. It was not hard to spread.] Leading to widespread infection of the vulnerable population. Then it eventually sanded off enough of the host’s immune system that any number of unrelated opportunistic infections would kill the host.
I’ll argue that both HIV & COVID are evolutionarily successful. And would have been far more so had they entered human circulation 100 or 150 years ago. :yikes:
Granted both those examples are viruses, not bacteria. But the concepts remain the same.
call me a crazy conspiracy theorist, but what if that that’s a weapons research facility and this isn’t just pneumonic plague, but a weaponized version of it? It’s not like Russia has a glowing reputation.
I believe that was mentioned earlier by @billy-jack but if you’re referring to the general knowledge possessed by the American public at large, well, my sweet summer child, a blessing of your heart may be in order.
It’s more than a little disconcerting that he would contract and die of the Pneumonic Plague in a place specifically designed to prevent the acquisition and spread of the Pneumonic Plague.
He? The death in this case was a woman. From the CNN coverage
The researcher, a 28-year-old female laboratory technician at the Irkutsk Research Anti-Plague Institute of Siberia, in the town of Shelekhov, died after being diagnosed with a pneumonia of “unknown” origin, according to Rospotrebnadzor, the Russian agency that handles infectious disease.
It’s more than a little disconcerting that she would contract and die of the Pneumonic Plague in a place specifically designed to prevent the acquisition and spread of the Pneumonic Plague.
Correction noted though, gender aside, my point stands. LOL
IIUC, you very much do not want bacterial pneumonia. It makes you feel cold, so you proceed to take appropriate measures, and as your fever rises, you feel colder yet, so you try harder to get warm, in a vicious spiral, and if they get to you in time, you wake up in a bathtub full of ice, but if you are left to your own devices, you will cook yourself to a crispy turn, and the time window here is a very few hours.
The name of the deceased researcher is Darya Shipilova, and according to The Times (of London), she was exposed when she broke “a test tube containing the pneumonic plague pathogen.”
From the NYT article, it seems like that comes from a single source:
Pavel Stepanov, a local journalist, wrote on his Telegram channel that a young laboratory assistant had broken a test vial and died. In a subsequent post on Monday, Mr. Stepanov defended his reporting and questioned why some government agencies and Kremlin-friendly news outlets had deleted statements and stories about Irkutsk.
I found another article in which Darya Shipilova’s mother (also a medical professional) denied the idea of a broken test tube, saying that was not easy to do. IOW, there’s a lot of rumors and misinformation floating around.
