Wikipedia says: "in the United States, infections occasionally occur in rural areas, where the bacteria are believed to circulate among rodents." A few years ago a boy in Russia contracted the plague after interacting with a wild marmot, he was treated successfully without any problems. I think this news is overblown, because everyone immediately pictures 14th century Europe
I saw a post about this on Reddit this morning. Haven't looked into it further, but people were claiming that there are versions of this plague that have been modified to release other toxins. It's effectively a bioweapon: they cure you for the plague, which kills you with the poison it contained.
Indeed. I wonder how much work it would be to make this antibiotic resistant. Then the Russians develop some bacteriophage that infects and kills the bacteria as their own cure.
My fear is that this is an enhanced virus that was being subjected to gain of function research, making it potentially much more dangerous than bog standard plague.
I also think it's overblown. My fear is that this is a special form of the disease, modified by Russian researchers for who knows what reasons, and may therefore be a problem.
People just dramatically updated their priors since Covid. We went from pandemics are a problem of previous centuries to any new outbreak might be a pandemic.
Don't forget that what passes for a white house in the USA lately is ripping the copper out of the walls of our health and human services departments at incredible pace to give more tax cuts to billionaires
Similar to the cruise-ship Hantavirus situation earlier this year. People see a disease they've never encountered and assume it's a novel pandemic. Really, it's just one of the rare cases where a westerner contracts a disease that's endemic to the global poor.
Most of people who are alive can relate to a very specific period in their lives, and it’s easy to imagine now what virus can do in terms of social life.
Are you discounting rural Americans as not being part of the global poor then? There have been roughly 30 cases a year in western states since the disease was first found here in the 90s
I think a lot of people don't realize the Black Plague is bacterial and we already have a cure for it. Most people getting anxious probably assume its like Covid and a cure would have to be developed.
I think it's pretty apparent from the news articles about it. She died of pneumonic plague, which is a fast-moving form of Yersinia Pestis infection that is roughly 100% fatal if first treatment occurs > 24 hours after symptoms start.
Why pneumonic plague? Pneumonic plague is the form of infection that occurs when plague bacteria are inhaled in aerosolized form into the lungs, or when septicemic plague (plague in the bloodstreams) reaches the lungs. Like, for example, when a test tube breaks. Her method of infection was a pretty textbook vector for pneumonic plague. Other cases have been caused when tissue samples of infected rodents have been splayed open, for example, or when blood from an infected person splatters the respiratory tract. Plague bacteria spreads pretty poorly otherwise, which is why the main vector for bubonic plague is flea bites.
If it's the pneumonia style (i.e. the infection is in the lungs, not the lymph nodes) you have to start antibiotics very quickly or it's basically 100% fatal. So it's treatable, but only to a point. The good news is basic masks and quarantine are extremely effective, so the risk of outright spread beyond the initial patients and very early health care workers is very small.
there is not information that's exactly the same bacteria and that drugs work. It might be novel one or modified in the lab. Even for flu we don't have general vaccine that works.
Yes, the fact that is the plague is less worrying than it is plague from a bio research lab that escaped. The only unfounded, non verified news i have read is that it can from collecting of samples, not post experimenting. But your guess is as good as mine at this point
Prairie dogs are the main carriers in the US, and yet some people still want to give them protections because they are “cute”. They are literal vermin. Colorado is attempting to put a bag limit on hunting them, which is ridiculous given nobody is bagging their prairie dog kills. Because again, they are vermin.
Damn, I'm worried whether Russia’s response will prioritise containing the pathogen or containing the embarrassment. You can’t patch a public-health incident with a press release.
I suspect it will be similar to the current American regime's past handling of COVID: a lot of skilled people wanting to do the right thing, but having to fight an unnecessary uphill battle against the administration that was more interested in perception, economics, and politics than lives.
Is your implication that COVID was intentionally created in an American bioweapons lab with the goal of creating something both highly deadly and highly transmissible for use in future conflicts?
Take a guess, will Putin prioritize the safety of humans or his own pride? He’s literally waging a war that is based on his warped divine feeling of pride for Rus
Alternatively, that's just an excuse, and he's waging a war because the existential threat to his autocratic kleptocracy by even a modestly successful, somewhat democratic neighboring state with significant inter-country exchange of people and ideas.
Worse yet, this is contained but Putin will use it to argue against foreign actors weakening him further because 'think of the consequences`. I hate how paranoid this timeline has made me.
Ever wonder what a country waging a grinding siege war could do with a plague lab?
That’s keeping me up. Threaten nukes and deploy the plague to show you aren’t kidding.
There was a news story yesterday about the Ukrainian government using drones to airlift medicine to occupied territories that have been cut off from pharmaceutical supply chains (the occupation forces said they would figure it out, but didn’t)
> Ever wonder what a country waging a grinding siege war could do with a plague lab?
There's a reason the US and Soviets were largely willing to get rid of the stuff - it's fairly useless geopolitically, because you mostly can't target it.
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky calls Vladimir Putin "patient zero" of global wars spreading: "He must be denied the space to act and the space to spread this evil further."
- Taylor Swift announces surprise new single: “Patient Zero”
There are as many possibilities as one could imagine. This is still hypothetical (as I said in my comment above, I know what I will assume only if it disrupts the elections, and hope it does not, which will restore some trust), but means, motives and who benefits are important to remember when evaluating unknowable situations. Granting the benefit of the doubt is not something I do for this US administration and their fellow travelers.
I agree, which is why it's important to realize that the means for the US administration to cause this are very remote, and the potential benefits of this situation (particularly on the elections as you mention) are even more obscure.
I'm not saying the US hasn't done its fair share of shady and immoral operations, probably more than any other country in the world, but the scenario you propose is more akin to a Rube Goldberg machine than any realistic covert operation.
Once again, this is hypothetical- only if this is not contained, i.e., what ever safety precautions to prevent this were broken.
Your lack of belief in how covert operations work shows a lack of history. I obviously have no secret knowledge about his, but even reading one or two historical accounts about intelligence services (and others) would prove you wrong
This disease is generally highly treatable. Your conspiracy theory hinges on a belief that a treatable disease in a foreign country will be used to do something with the ongoing (ballots are already going out) US midterm elections, when in 2020 the US still held regular elections despite the ongoing, and far less treatable at the time, COVID pandemic.
My original comment is flagged, so I will assume you didn’t read it and don’t understand my hypothetical. Here it is: if this is used as a pretext to prevent the US mid-term elections, then I will assume that it was intentional (accepting that it might have merely just been taken advantage of), because this is an unknowable situation for me (and you), and this administration does not deserve the benefit of the doubt in anything it does anymore
“COVID was airborne. COVID had a case fatality rate of 1%. Pneumonic plague, without antibiotics, has a case fatality rate of 100%.” Annie Jacobsen Author of Biological War [00:23:00] https://www.jordanharbinger.com/annie-jacobsen-the-genes-and...
Wikipedia says: "in the United States, infections occasionally occur in rural areas, where the bacteria are believed to circulate among rodents." A few years ago a boy in Russia contracted the plague after interacting with a wild marmot, he was treated successfully without any problems. I think this news is overblown, because everyone immediately pictures 14th century Europe
You should read up on the long history of Russian Biological War programs. Fascinating stuff. They came up with some insane versions of plague.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_biological_weapons_prog...
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/rr/rr7003a1.htm?
I saw a post about this on Reddit this morning. Haven't looked into it further, but people were claiming that there are versions of this plague that have been modified to release other toxins. It's effectively a bioweapon: they cure you for the plague, which kills you with the poison it contained.
Yep. And this is a lab that was reportedly doing gain-of-function research.
Indeed. I wonder how much work it would be to make this antibiotic resistant. Then the Russians develop some bacteriophage that infects and kills the bacteria as their own cure.
My fear is that this is an enhanced virus that was being subjected to gain of function research, making it potentially much more dangerous than bog standard plague.
Pneumonic plague seems bad enough.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumonic_plague
I also think it's overblown. My fear is that this is a special form of the disease, modified by Russian researchers for who knows what reasons, and may therefore be a problem.
People just dramatically updated their priors since Covid. We went from pandemics are a problem of previous centuries to any new outbreak might be a pandemic.
The disease is not the problem, people's reaction to it, is.
Don't forget that what passes for a white house in the USA lately is ripping the copper out of the walls of our health and human services departments at incredible pace to give more tax cuts to billionaires
Similar to the cruise-ship Hantavirus situation earlier this year. People see a disease they've never encountered and assume it's a novel pandemic. Really, it's just one of the rare cases where a westerner contracts a disease that's endemic to the global poor.
Most of people who are alive can relate to a very specific period in their lives, and it’s easy to imagine now what virus can do in terms of social life.
Are you discounting rural Americans as not being part of the global poor then? There have been roughly 30 cases a year in western states since the disease was first found here in the 90s
This was a "28-year-old employee at the anti-plague institute in the city of Irkutsk", she didn't catch it from a rat in a rural area.
I think a lot of people don't realize the Black Plague is bacterial and we already have a cure for it. Most people getting anxious probably assume its like Covid and a cure would have to be developed.
Another thing is that the Black Plague symptoms are pretty horrible, enough to cause anxiety even if you know there is a cure.
Do you have a theory for why that researcher died?
I think it's pretty apparent from the news articles about it. She died of pneumonic plague, which is a fast-moving form of Yersinia Pestis infection that is roughly 100% fatal if first treatment occurs > 24 hours after symptoms start.
Why pneumonic plague? Pneumonic plague is the form of infection that occurs when plague bacteria are inhaled in aerosolized form into the lungs, or when septicemic plague (plague in the bloodstreams) reaches the lungs. Like, for example, when a test tube breaks. Her method of infection was a pretty textbook vector for pneumonic plague. Other cases have been caused when tissue samples of infected rodents have been splayed open, for example, or when blood from an infected person splatters the respiratory tract. Plague bacteria spreads pretty poorly otherwise, which is why the main vector for bubonic plague is flea bites.
If it's the pneumonia style (i.e. the infection is in the lungs, not the lymph nodes) you have to start antibiotics very quickly or it's basically 100% fatal. So it's treatable, but only to a point. The good news is basic masks and quarantine are extremely effective, so the risk of outright spread beyond the initial patients and very early health care workers is very small.
there is not information that's exactly the same bacteria and that drugs work. It might be novel one or modified in the lab. Even for flu we don't have general vaccine that works.
Yes, the fact that is the plague is less worrying than it is plague from a bio research lab that escaped. The only unfounded, non verified news i have read is that it can from collecting of samples, not post experimenting. But your guess is as good as mine at this point
Prairie dogs are the main carriers in the US, and yet some people still want to give them protections because they are “cute”. They are literal vermin. Colorado is attempting to put a bag limit on hunting them, which is ridiculous given nobody is bagging their prairie dog kills. Because again, they are vermin.
They are food for coyotes and similar predators, no? They have a place in the ecology of the area.
Damn, I'm worried whether Russia’s response will prioritise containing the pathogen or containing the embarrassment. You can’t patch a public-health incident with a press release.
I suspect it will be similar to the current American regime's past handling of COVID: a lot of skilled people wanting to do the right thing, but having to fight an unnecessary uphill battle against the administration that was more interested in perception, economics, and politics than lives.
I mean we are talking about the successor state to the one that botched the Chernobyl response, it's not hard to imagine a repeat
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Is your implication that COVID was intentionally created in an American bioweapons lab with the goal of creating something both highly deadly and highly transmissible for use in future conflicts?
I see how this could be confusing for you. Note that we're discussing the response to a potential crisis.
Literally nothing in parent comment would suggest that, no.
Who will be Russia’s Li Wenliang
Russians don't do disasters by halves, so we should prepare ourselves for the worst outcome.
Take a guess, will Putin prioritize the safety of humans or his own pride? He’s literally waging a war that is based on his warped divine feeling of pride for Rus
Alternatively, that's just an excuse, and he's waging a war because the existential threat to his autocratic kleptocracy by even a modestly successful, somewhat democratic neighboring state with significant inter-country exchange of people and ideas.
Worse yet, this is contained but Putin will use it to argue against foreign actors weakening him further because 'think of the consequences`. I hate how paranoid this timeline has made me.
> I hate how paranoid this timeline has made me
Ever wonder what a country waging a grinding siege war could do with a plague lab?
That’s keeping me up. Threaten nukes and deploy the plague to show you aren’t kidding.
There was a news story yesterday about the Ukrainian government using drones to airlift medicine to occupied territories that have been cut off from pharmaceutical supply chains (the occupation forces said they would figure it out, but didn’t)
> Ever wonder what a country waging a grinding siege war could do with a plague lab?
There's a reason the US and Soviets were largely willing to get rid of the stuff - it's fairly useless geopolitically, because you mostly can't target it.
That’s only if you care about nation states.
you should consume less internet -- will make you feel a bit better
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49960084 (277 comments)
I really don't like FAFO science.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49960084
September 23rd, 2026:
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky calls Vladimir Putin "patient zero" of global wars spreading: "He must be denied the space to act and the space to spread this evil further."
- Taylor Swift announces surprise new single: “Patient Zero”
First China and now Russia? We can't allow a pandemic gap!
Either way it's a communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
That's why I only drink pure grain alcohol and rainwater
Thankfully the MAHA movement will get the fluoride out of our water.
glad we laid off so many government workers and cdc staff, and politicized their work. very cool and certainly making things great.
The AI giants are developing their own private bio labs, so at least we can rely on them to fill the knowledge gap.
I always wanted to live through TWO pandemics! /s
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If you think we don't care, well, get ready for a level of not caring that will be hard to fathom.
This is the successor state to the country that thought it could hide a cloud of nuclear fallout.
Rubio is closely monitoring - by frantically reloading X and reddit.
While also working as Viceroy of Venezuela.
Oh, and National Security Advisor.
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The CIA broke into the lab in Irkutsk and caused the worker to drop the vial, in order to influence elections in the US? Sounds plausible...
There are as many possibilities as one could imagine. This is still hypothetical (as I said in my comment above, I know what I will assume only if it disrupts the elections, and hope it does not, which will restore some trust), but means, motives and who benefits are important to remember when evaluating unknowable situations. Granting the benefit of the doubt is not something I do for this US administration and their fellow travelers.
> means, motives and who benefits are important
I agree, which is why it's important to realize that the means for the US administration to cause this are very remote, and the potential benefits of this situation (particularly on the elections as you mention) are even more obscure.
I'm not saying the US hasn't done its fair share of shady and immoral operations, probably more than any other country in the world, but the scenario you propose is more akin to a Rube Goldberg machine than any realistic covert operation.
Once again, this is hypothetical- only if this is not contained, i.e., what ever safety precautions to prevent this were broken.
Your lack of belief in how covert operations work shows a lack of history. I obviously have no secret knowledge about his, but even reading one or two historical accounts about intelligence services (and others) would prove you wrong
This disease is generally highly treatable. Your conspiracy theory hinges on a belief that a treatable disease in a foreign country will be used to do something with the ongoing (ballots are already going out) US midterm elections, when in 2020 the US still held regular elections despite the ongoing, and far less treatable at the time, COVID pandemic.
Your hypothetical is not based in reality.
My original comment is flagged, so I will assume you didn’t read it and don’t understand my hypothetical. Here it is: if this is used as a pretext to prevent the US mid-term elections, then I will assume that it was intentional (accepting that it might have merely just been taken advantage of), because this is an unknowable situation for me (and you), and this administration does not deserve the benefit of the doubt in anything it does anymore
Putin was told that <whatever they named this plague> was responsible for causing problems, and therefore the vial was thrown out a window.