… diphtheria, a highly infectious respiratory disease that colonizes a person’s nose and throat, creating a thick layer of dead cells that can block the airway. It has always had a reputation for sickening children.
… Today it’s largely considered a disease of the past. But now it’s back in the headlines, spreading quickly in places like Bangladesh and Yemen. The World Health Organization says it is sending a shipment of antitoxins to Bangladesh this weekend, after six deaths in a Rohingya refugee settlement. The organization did the same last week for Yemen, where at least 30 have died of the bacterial infection, many of them children…
The bacterium that causes diphtheria can live in some people without causing them to show symptoms, which can occasionally lead to a Typhoid Mary-type situation where a person spreads it around without even realizing he has it…
The bacteria attach to the lining of the respiratory system and produce a poison that starts killing healthy tissue. It does so by preventing cells from creating proteins, which essentially shuts them down. After a few days, it can kill so many cells that dead tissue forms a grayish layer in the nose and throat that can make it hard to breathe or swallow. Essentially, it can choke a person on his own dead cells. If the poison also gets into the bloodstream, it can damage vital organs like the heart and kidneys. Interestingly, there are actually two layers of infection going on here, because it’s a virus inside the bacterium that causes it to create the toxin in the first place. Eventually, the illness can cause nerve damage, paralysis and respiratory failure…
According to the CDC, even when people receive treatment, as many as 1 in 10 dies (and that ratio can be as high as 1 in 5 for children under the age of 5). For those who don’t receive treatment, as many as 1 in 2 dies…
This year, more than half a million members of the Rohingya ethnic group have fled to Bangladesh from Myanmar, where violence against them, including execution, arson and rape, has been denounced by the United Nations and the U.S. State Department as ethnic cleansing…
In Yemen, WHO researchers reported that vaccination rates among children had dropped below 70 percent after a civil war started in 2015, meaning the population was no longer protected by herd immunity, the concept that if enough people are immune to a disease, any individual who hasn’t been vaccinated won’t encounter the disease. The vaccination rate remained low in 2016, at 71 percent. In the past few days, blockades have prevented organizations like Doctors Without Borders from shipping medical supplies. The country has also suffered from a shortage of health professionals since its central bank stopped paying them.
Could it make a comeback in other countries as well?
Yes. For example, in 1989 the Soviet Union had 839 cases of diphtheria. But when the Soviet Union fell — and with it, vaccination rates — cases of diphtheria shot up. Between 1994 and 1995, about 100,000 people came down with the illness in former Soviet states. By the end of the outbreak, about 5,000 had died.
To pick a much smaller example, in 1996 researchers found 11 people with diphtheria in South Dakota, where the infection was thought to have disappeared.
Notice how weakly all of these monsters are held at bay. A small diminution of the vaccination rate, and out they come to play. And as they do, they are often looking for a vaccine resistant strain, which will rapidly be imported into the nation the moment it emerges.
Hopefully the motif the vaccine targets is integral to the toxin’s activity, and cannot be jettisoned at the genetic level by a mutant that would then be vaccine resistant, and still able to exploit the toxin’s effects. If not, as we speak, Darwin is looking for a vaccine-resistant mutant.
Regardless, who remembers getting a vaccine for it in the last ten years? And who expects quality healthcare once we are in the midst of a Great-Depression-level economic collapse? Add in all of our diverse new Americans, fresh off the plane from Bangladesh and Yemen, and you have yet one more possible pandemic threat.
There is no shortage of them.
I have a good laugh every time Yemen gets struck by a new plague. This is a country that produces nothing but Kath, for which they even waste their already short water supplies, cause the Aid Organisations feed them and their 5.0 Children they have in average. So the men can sit around, chew Kath, wear skirts and daggers. Nothing good comes from there. Their only export is Jihadis. This worthless region needs a big, fat purge and no plague is too good for that.
Airborne disease is always gross. Just think about for a second, a virus or bacterium, in some wooly haired vibrant floats in the air- and lands in YOU. Now its making copies of itself inside you and spreading to all your friends and family. That just gives me the heeby-jeebies.