Ebola virus outbreak

The One Who Knocks wrote: »

Because it is so lethal, the incubation period is short, and therefore there isn't much much time for it to be spread.

It needs to adapt and either have a longer incubation period, become less lethal or become airborne to do more damage.

Pretty much. Although pneumonic plague has an extremely short incubation period and is pretty much 100% fatal unless caught extremely early. Being airborne helps it.

The plague, the "Black Death", Yesinia pestis(SP?) if it ever goes virulent again it would make ebola look like the bloody sniffles. Antibiotics? Sure, they work if caught early enough in the Bubonic type, but plague is a right bastard as it has many modes of infection and transmission. Add in the pneumonic and septacemic types which are incredibly fast acting and even modern medicine would be quickly overwhelmed. If a strain became both virulent and antibiotic resistant, then Monty Python's Bring out your dead sketch would be less a joke and more a public information film. Some populations would have some inbuilt resistence - eg European ancestry folks as everyone reading this is reading this because their ancestors survived - but many wouldn't and even those with some inbuilt immunity might be compromised because of the lack of exposure for a few centuries and generally compromised immune systems(how many people have allergies these days?).

A really bad dose of influenza could really fcuk us up. People can forget that the Spanish flu in 1918 killed way more people than world war one. Up to 40 million people*. I remember my grandmother and great uncle telling me of watching as the coffins left the houses on their street in Dublin as people were dropping. Bring out your dead indeed. Of the two of them, she got it and he didn't. The Russian roulette of the pathogen. She told me for her it was akin to a very bad cold that got her off school for a couple of weeks(though wodjus headaches apparently), yet as she put it "men in their prime" were struck down and pine suited in days. Scary shíte altogether.

There are any number of potential buggy bastards out there. The rural oriental habit of keeping pigs and bird and humans in close proximity near guarantees new pathogens will come along, but there are other vectors too and many that aren't on the radar. IMH if one right bastid comes along it'll come out of left field and won't be noticed until people start dropping where they didn't expect them to drop. Might even be an oldie thought long gone like a new smallpox.

Nearly all such killers start of as a low level set of symptoms, feeling a bit bollocksed, "ah I'm comin down with the dose that's going around. be grand" and that includes Plague. All too easy for doctors to miss something truly devastating, even with the best will in the world. I'd bet the farm that if I showed up in an Irish casualty dept tonight with early stage pneumonic or bubonic plague, a) I'd be triaged and told to wait for many hours infecting the waiting room and b) if and when I was seen I'd be likely sent off home with a script for paracetamol and wide spectrum antibiotics, if I looked a bit "chesty". Goes for the rest of the world's medical responses too.



* In that case having a compromised immune system would help as that kind of virus tends to kill the healthy robust adults and leaves the kids and elderly alive. Some isolated settlements in Alaska and such when outsiders came back after the pandemic they found the graveyards full of healthy adults and most that were left were the kids and grannies. Basically it seems your own immune response kills you, so if it's fooked then...