An interesting article about disease-laden Africa and how all the plagues and pestilence in any part of the world is just one Boeing away from becoming our problem.
Zombie are the new normal in EOTW fiction, but before then the big science fiction threat was some sort of superflu (“The Stand”, anyone?)
We’re kinda seeing it now in NYC with their measles episode. Heck, right here in my college town we’re having an outbreak of whooping cough. Not to get anyone’s tinfoil hat into a twist, but that whole “I don’t need to vaccinate my kid if everyone else is vaccinated” doesn’t seem to be working very well.
It’s tough to avoid people, but I suppose if you live out in the desert where you can go quite a while between human contact you might wind up missing the whole pandemic. Or you might die alone drowning in your own fluid-filled lungs. :::shrug:::
The folks at Fatherland Homeland security used to tell us to keep duct tape and plastic sheeting around for this sort of thing. Remember that? (And remember that awesome color-coded alert system they introduced?)
I suppose the only thing you can really do to mitigate your chances of being a victim of some pandemic is avoid people, be prepared to stay indoors for a length of time, and bleach/sterilize/sanitize the hell out of everything. I know that I could lock the doors and not leave my house for a couple months. Thats no guarantee against catching Captain Trips but it seems that your chances of catching something from someone is greatly reduced when you avoid all contact with those someones.
The article linked above is pretty interesting. It just reinforces that the African continent is well and truly screwed.
This reminds me of a call I received way back in 2002. The caller was a friend who sat on the emergency planning council for the City of Toronto and his call scared the crap out of me. He told me that there was a super bug coming from China that killed a lot more than the flu and that they didn’t have a clue about how to treat it. My friend also suggested that I put away some supplies to last until it burned itself out.
That super bug was SARS, and by pure luck the authorities managed to contain it. When it was all over, I caught up with my friend over a couple of beers to get the inside scoop. One very telling thing he said to me was they managed to get lucky, this time. But it will only be a matter of time until we get hit again and then, we may not get off so easily.
Ebola is transmitted by contact with bodily fluids. Messy and dangerous of course but, at least it isn’t airborne. The vaccine seems to work but is in short supply. And it’s going exclusively to areas with active outbreaks. I’d go get one today if it was available.
https://www.sciencealert.com/an-experimental-ebola-vaccine-has-been-shown-to-be-97-effective-in-the-current-outbreak
marburg is the airborne variety of ebola
Reading up on Marburg, I found transmission was almost identical to Ebola although WHO and CDC both state limited respiratory spread is possible. Maybe they’re soft-pedaling it.
http://raconteurreport.blogspot.com/
The blogger Aesop has info on Ebola. Works in the medical field. He points out that droplets stay suspended in the air for many minutes from sneezing and coughing, which Ebola sufferers do on a constant basis. This makes it an airborne disease, for all intents and purposes.
Peter at
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/
is an old Africa hand, and has recently written on the subject. Useful background info on why this subject is important to watch.
Thanks, Will. Now a word from Reality:
1) Ebola is spread by coughs and sneezes.
That’s droplet precautions, not contact.
2) Coughed and sneezed particles of virus-laden material travel 25 feet, and are suspended in air up to ten minutes.
3) The minimum number of Ebola viruses sufficient to ensure infection is one.
4) In the current DRC Ebola outbreak, 50% of victims show no sign of fever once infected.
5) The only symptom airport screeners over there and over here look at, to screen out potential Ebola victims from travelling, is (wait for it)…fever.
6) There are 11…ELEVEN…total BL-IV hospital beds to properly care for Ebola victims, in all of north America, and three of those are permanently reserved for military victims near the US chem/bio research labs.
7) In 2014, we had filled 10 of those beds at once with the victims of Ebola we were treating, including the two ICU nurses from Dallas from one case of Ebola in the wild, in the US.
IOW, we were two patients from being Liberia then, or Kivu province now.
8) Once it hits mainstream US hospitals, society here is functionally over, in about a week.
So, you do the math on how well screeners (known worldwide for looking the other way for a sawbuck) and possessed of a 6th-grade education on average, and hazy acquaintance with scientific thought or math without taking their shoes off, will do at protecting the First World from the pestilence of the Turd World.
Ain’t. Gonna. Happen.
Afterwards, you’ll probably want to review Zero’s posts and links on the local LDS cannery nearest you, and start stocking up on buckets, and water barrels, along with the sort of canned goods that come in square olive drab metal cans.
The question isn’t whether such pestilence is coming here, it’s simply a matter of when.
After that, YOYO.
God help you if you’ve ignored preparations for such an eventuality, at that point.
Nothing else will.
(Where I’m working currently, they’re doing decon drills, which, exactly like the ones the .mil had me do in the 1980s, mainly serve to underline that with chem/bio threats, in any serious outbreak, the first people infected are going to die, quickly, and the most prudent response besides running for the hills and living behind concertina wire for weeks to months (if you can manage that), will be to bend over, grab your ankles, and kiss your @$$ goodbye.
You will see this material again.
Best Wishes.
– Aesop
Once again, Aesop nails it.
There is an Ebola virus strain that is airborne: Reston.
An outbreak of this virus was in 1989 in Reston, VA – a suburb of Washington, DC. Luckily for us it is the only filovirus not known to infect humans!
The book Hot Zone describes the events fairly accurately. If that was a “normal” Ebola virus, things would have been very different now…
The answer to the question is simple. Illegal immigration is responsible for it all. Measles, mumps, antibiotic resistant strains of TB, Whooping cough, polio. Not to mention Ecoli, salmonella and listeria.
How to stop is easy. Vote out every member of Congress who is a member of the CPUSA. And every open borders RINO. Then close the border for at least fifty years.
Just because we eradicated these diseases here does not mean they don’t exist in the third world.
The idea that thirty percent of the population of Mexico and twenty percent of El Salvador now reside within our borders should send more than a shiver up your spine. It should scare the hell right out of you.
That’s stupid and wrong.
And what part are you referring to? The numbers given for the population of third world countries living on American soil is accurate. They come from Uncle Socialist numbers .
Closing the border for fifty years? From 1924 to 1965 the United States prohibited mass migration. During WWII it was allowed on a case by case basis such as Albert Einstein.
The first ever Ecoli outbreak was traced to a meat packing plant in Omaha Nebraska that had replaced most of its American workers with cheaper labor from Mexico. The chain restaurants affected were the Jack In The Box restaurants in Commiefornia.
Can you give us a link for your numbers for the percentage of people from other countries living in the US?
“The idea that thirty percent of the population of Mexico and twenty percent of El Salvador now reside within our borders”
Steelheart
Boy, you sure put him in his place. Cuck.
Stupid is allowing an invasion of your country by turd worlders who share no common values or culture.
The problem is– unchecked immigration from countries that do not vaccinate for any of these things!
Avoid crowds!!
We’re going to get hit by engineered bugs sometime in the foreseeable (if not sooner) future. It’s not a matter of if it’s when… Such a release has real potential to wipeout a very sizeable chunk of this country’s population. Plan accordingly would be my humble advice…
Best Regards
I believe the anti-vax factor is much more pervasive & mainstream (and global) than most people imagine. RFK, jr is a big promoter, among many others.
Humans sure are funny animals.
Okay – I’m confused. If the vaccinated are safe because of their vaccinations, why do the unvaccinated pose risks of infecting them ? Are people saying that the vaccines aren’t effective ? To me, the ones who would be unsafe are the unvaccinated.
Generally speaking that’s true, although a 90-95% efficacy means some vaccinated will still get sick. A lot of unvaccinated folks still means a very expensive public health crisis.
Except it doesn’t appear that the vaccines currently available are anywhere near 95% effective. More like 0%-80% depending on the virus strain and vaccine.
The vaccinated are SAFER. Not “safe.”
And there are a multitude of people who can not be vaccinated for one reason or other, for whom “herd immunity” (due to mass vaccination) means a far lower risk of exposure to infection.
Anti-vax stupidity is the flat-earth thinking of the 21st century. Only it can kill, rather than merely amuse.
The main risk is to children that are too young for a vaccination. For example, a child has to be at least 6 months old to be vaccinated against measles. Exposure of measles before that can result in encephalitis (brain swelling) and/or death.
The secondary risk is that your vaccination isn’t necessarily effective forever.
Your 40- or 50-year old measles shot may not leave middle-aged you with enough on-board immunity to successfully fight off a new outbreak, and you haven’t had a booster shot for decades.
Which means once you get a good outbreak going, everyone’s essentially unvaccinated.
Sweet dreams.
Not everyone can get vaccines. The very young, some people with allergies, and there’s a few other folks. Vaccines aren’t 100% effective. I thought I was covered and then did a vaccine titer because my vaccine records were a mess and I needed coverage for work. Turns out I was walking around naked. I had to get every single shot again.
I had the mumps in 1965 as a kid.
In 1968 we moved to a military base where my dad was working with nerve gas and other “biologics”. Everyone in the family had to get Measles, Mumps, SmallPox, Polio and a number of other vaccinations regardless of prior history.
In 1992 I contracted Mumps from a baby someone handed me at church. The baby, we found out the next day, had Mumps.
I got the Mumps at 38 years old. I spent 3 days in ICU. Medical students, who had never seen an adult male with Mumps came to look at me by the carload ! I wasn’t very pretty and STILL suffer from the ordeal
I thought, no, wished I had died many a time in the ICU and during my convalescence.
My point. Vaccinations are NOT forever and all the strains of these diseases out there can not be vaccinated against.
unchecked immigration brought smallpox to Native Americans and wiped out over 80% of their population. Self-preservation Hindsight being 20/20, they should have turned every European into an arrow pincushion the second they stepped off the boat and then let the tide take the bodies out to the sharks. In one of the first examples of bio-war, The US Army intentionally gave out blankets in winter infected with the smallpox virus to infect the uppity native population.
I thought the first recorded bio-war tactics were catapulting dead horses and corpses into besieged cities to spread illness.
This and rubbing poo on sharp stabby things….
that’s why it says ‘one of the first’ and not ‘the first’
The U.S. Army did no such thing concerning blankets infected with small pox. That would be the British in what is now Canada in the 18th century. American colonists did bring germs that the Native American had no immunity too, but that wasn’t intentional. People didn’t understand back then how these thing were transmitted from one person to another.
They BOTH did it!
Genocide (and attempted genocide) is nothing new…
Exactly.
The “smallpox infected blankets” trope is an old wives tale and unmitigated twaddle perpetrated mainly by pseudo-historians like Ward Churchill and his ilk.
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/plag/5240451.0001.009/–did-the-us-army-distribute-smallpox-blankets-to-indians?rgn=main;view=fulltext
Plus, it would have been a genius move for them to have done such a thing in 1837, over a two full decades before Louis Pasteur first promulgated Germ Theory scientifically(1860-64 experiments), and a decade and more on top of that before it gained any credence amongst even medical professionals. So those were some pretty cunning Army officers, in an occupation universally renowned for dolts and lackwits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur
Native Americans were wiped out by colds, influenza, VD, and every other disease carried here from abroad, to which they had no native immunities whatsoever, not just from smallpox.
And anyone claiming any actual numbers on any of the above is pulling them out of his hindquarters, because such primary data never existed, and never could.
The natives here were cheerfully whacking each other for millennia before we got here (it’s what they do), and continued to do so until the late 1800s, with gusto and glee.
Other than that…
Thanks, Aesop for expanding on and explaining in more detail.
“Native Americans were wiped out by colds, influenza, VD, and every other disease carried here from abroad”
Native Americans, like Europeans, experienced higher mortality as the transition from hunter-gatherers to farmers progressed. But European farmers and pastoralists lived in close proximity to – often under the same roof as – their livestock, and so were exposed early in life to diseases for which poultry and livestock are reservoirs. As a result, they were more likely to have some immunity to colds, influenza, and (drumroll) smallpox, measles, mumps, and rubella, among other viral diseases. Native Americans without that multigenerational pattern were much more vulnerable.
As to smallpox in pre-vaccination (from cowpox; vacca is “cow”) North America …
“Smallpox was a scourge of the American Colonies, decimating Native American populations and then playing a part in the Revolutionary War. British soldiers had better immunity to the disease than the colonial troops, and may have even used it as a weapon. In 1776, half of the 10,000 Continental Army soldiers around Quebec fell ill with smallpox; of the outbreak, John Adams wrote, “The smallpox is ten times more terrible than the British, Canadians and Indians together. This was the cause of our precipitate retreat from Quebec.”
The following year, George Washington, as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, ordered mandatory inoculation against smallpox for any soldier who had not gained prior immunity against the disease through infection. The procedure in that era was known as variolation, intentionally exposing someone to a mild form of the smallpox virus (Jenner would not develop the smallpox vaccine until 1796).
For the British Army in the North American colonies, inoculation was voluntary.
As a result of Washington’s orders, the Continental Army was the first in the world with an organized program to prevent smallpox. Some historians have suggested that if smallpox inoculation had been performed earlier, the smallpox outbreak among Continental soldiers in Quebec could have been avoided—speeding up the conclusion of the Revolutionary War and potentially allowing for the addition of some or all of the British colony of Canada to the United States.”
https://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/articles/us-military-and-vaccine-history
It certainly did not take illegal immigration to spread the Plague through Europe. All it takes is trade. Globalism connects us all and the potential downside is catastrophic.
The Captain Trips reference is great. I read that book again every 5-6 years. Classic.
David Gerold’s “War Against the Chtorr” (the first book) is much better plague fiction than “The Stand”. The difference is that Gerold’s characters are much more “Heinleinian” than those in the King novel.
Reading your article and Aesop’s has me thinking about storing more food and the ability to close off my property – for example, barbed wire or razor wire.
Concertina is your friend.
Especially during an outbreak, when positioned properly and continuously around your perimeter, under observation and fire at all times.
And at that point, little glass apple juice bottles filled half-and-half with dish soap and unleaded are a sanitation device.
What is your suggested ignitor for bottles?
Anything flammable will suffice.
An accelerant-soaked rag is the historical/traditional choice, but if you have the means, 12 ga. flares give you a handier stand-off distance, and don’t create what certain agencies refer to as a “destructive device” prior to times WROL.
Prison, AFAIK, is probably among the worst places to be during a pandemic.
Just saying.
And that is SOAP, not detergent.
Detergents will not gel flame fuels.
Styrofoam is another option…
Or even just diesel/fuel oil.