ebola

EBOLA

At first, I gave about zero concern to Ebola ( fun filled fact- named after the Ebola River in Zaire where it was first discovered in the 1970‘s ).  I’m thinking, okay, this is a tropical disease.  After it spread farther and wider than ever before, it was STILL in tropical countries.  You know, nasty places where parasites swim up your junk, skin diseases perch on your ass and mosquito’s kill you ( and snakes frolic in the devil’s own backyard ).  Places where the only saving grace to living there is that it grows more than one crop a year and you need fuel only for cooking rather than for heating.  Places I don’t want to live-Florida was close enough and only petroleum makes living in a swamp fun enough for beach bums to describe it as paradise.  They were welcome to their 90% humidity, their cassava and their killer diseases.  Well, my minions derided and chastised me for my indifference, of course.  If your minions don’t try to keep you from looking stupid, then they are just simpleton bootlickers rather than loyal minions.  I still wasn’t all that concerned- after all, I’m almost completely alone on my anti-semi auto stand and I’ve yet to budge from that no matter what my readers profess.  Yet, coming home Friday afternoon, a random thought infiltrated my brain ( most likely due to a rare lazy day at work which allowed some cranial activity other than bitching about running around as if my ass were on fire ).  I recalled having a book that argued that the Black Death was a hemorrhagic fever rather than bubonic plague.

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The book is “Return Of The Black Death” by Susan Scott and Christopher Duncan.  Now, it isn’t all that easy to breeze through.  It is written for the layperson, but you can tell that they had to really work at padding it out to 300 pages.  It was a relaxed writing style, but it just went on and on for far too long.  I did devote almost all of Saturday to it, other than my long put off once yearly gun oiling that ate up two hours ( I have to retrieve some hidden ones ) and provided a break from the book.  The original part of the authors efforts was reconstructing events from parish records to prove the work of others who claimed that fleas could not have been the cause of the Black Death.  It seemed that around a hundred years ago, solely from the reports of the black armpit/groin swellings, bubonic plague was decried as the culprit and few since that questioned that ( it is so engrained in our learning that millions were spend trying to weaponize that disease, all to little success ).  Yet, as the authors show, this is clearly not the case.  Europe does not have a resistant rodent population.  There were no rats in rural England.  Bubonic plague spreads too slowly.  Temperatures were too cold for fleas.  The mortality was too low and you can’t spread it in Iceland.  Let’s look at each one of these.

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Not all rodents die from the bubonic bacterium.  Rats are highly susceptible yet voles and gerbils are not, for instance.  You need a fellow rodent population that ISN’T going to die from the disease in order to keep it in an area.  If all the rodents die, there won’t be a population to keep it around for the next outbreak.  Europe, alone among the habitable continents, has none.  It only has rats and once they are killed off the disease stops being harbored.  As far as rural rats, brown rats were not introduced to England until hundreds of years after the Black Death.  They are a much hardier species than the black rats-and the Blacks were the ones who were around for the Black Death.  The Blacks are not seen out of warmer countries except in port areas, and they are never seen more than a few miles from those ports.  They could not have spread the Plague to far inland areas.  In Iceland, there were two well documented Plague outbreaks.  Yet NO rats were reported in Iceland until hundreds of years later.  In England, it is too cold in summer for fleas to hatch.  As far as speed of spread, in 1907 in India bubonic plague spent six weeks to go one hundred yards and in South Africa it was moving a maximum of 12 miles a year.  That was with modern transportation.  With the start of the Black Death, when mortality was highest ( at start, it wasn’t unusual to have 70-90% of the population wiped out, but in 300 years that dropped to around 15% ), the travel rate was two thousand miles in three years.  With sailing ship the fastest conveyance. 

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Another important point was that bubonic plague victims show only limited signs of organ necrosis.  But the Black Death autopsies clearly showed advanced state of such.  Writings from the period make it very plain that human infection, person to person, was known to cause the disease.  Also, it became stand practice to implement a 40 day quarantine ( writings show that there was a very well understood preventive measures, even if the microbiologic understandings were nonexistent ), whereas bubonic plague has a much shorter infection period.  Today, there are regular bubonic cases, a person or three, and no plagues get started.  So, we are complacent.  Since we think the Black Death is dead and we have proven so successful in stopping it every year ( especially in the American West ), because we think it is flea driven bubonic plague rather than something else, we ignore it.  Yet, if it is a hemorrhagic fever, as the Black Death period writings seem to indicate ( describing three to five day infection to death, the runaway fever, insatiable thirst, vomiting dark blood, human fluid transmission ), it will be VERY easy to replicate the Black Death ( on a side note, very recently I read a reprinting on the Native Americans telling of the smallpox epidemic in the early years of Spanish invasion and to me, although I could easily be mistaken, it sounds pretty indicative of hemorrhagic fever with quick violent bleeding, flesh peeling death ).

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It seems quite possible that Ebola could be the new Black Death.  And if the Black Death WAS hemorrhagic fever like Ebola, then certainly Ebola can spread wide and far from the tropics ( experts believe that Africa is the home of most human disease births as man was there the longest and disease evolved there the longest ).  True, it slows down drastically in winter.  In some places, mostly smaller rural areas with lower population, say, under a thousand, it dies in the winter and doesn’t survive to spring.  But, yes, it DOES survive inside in winter, as a minion stated.  But, it also needs a neighboring warm and wet incubation spot.  France was that spot for England and North Europe.  The plague died after killing everyone it was going to and not reintroduced until the next merchant ship showed up from France.  In the US, Florida and the Gulf Of Mexico area is going to be perfect for incubating Ebola.  It will spread from there ( this is assuming a plague gets started ) to the northern and dryer areas, die off with the population ( remember, up to 90% die-off at first ) and be reintroduced with merchants traveling out to those areas again.  So, I do plead ignorance and ask forgiveness.  Ebola could be a very big deal to all of us ( for fear filled examples of the care NOT being taken in clean up with suspected carriers-such as no protective suits cleaning vomit and protective suit wearers ROLLING UP THEIR SLEEVES, keep up on Zero Hedge website ).  Still want to go to Wal-Mart last minute for shopping after the SHTF?

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