Plague kills New Mexico Woman... plague is endemic in northern New Mexico/Arizona and in the deserts of southern California...the docs of the Navajo reservation have to keep it in mind if someone has a fever and lymph nodes, in the same way we Oklahoma docs had to keep Rocky Mountain spotted fever in mind if we had a patient with high fever and flu like symptoms in the summer...
Good news: It can be treated with antibiotics and is rarely fatal if you catch it in time...
Bad News: It is one of the germs, like anthrax and a lot of other germs , that can be used as a biological weapon...
Good news: The germs used as biological weapons occur normally, but can be stopped. Indeed, unless one wants to take the risk of having your own people die (e.g. a smallpox attack in these days of jet planes would quickly travel to the whole world) they are tricky to use. Indeed, the real problem with the 2001 Anthrax scare was not that people were being sent Anthrax (the strain was a common strain, similar to that found in Oklahoma barnyards, not the drug resistant strain of weapons), but that someone had ground it to fine powder, which meant that it was not the work of a nut job, but required expertise, specialized grinding machines, and positive pressure decontamination techniques so that the person devising it would not die...
Bad News: Why worry about plague when we're all going to die of birdflu?
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