Pneumonic Plaque Spreading In Madagascar

Pestilence is mounting up:

The plague has claimed close to 100 lives in Madagascar as the medieval disease spreads across the tropical island. Travellers are being told to stay away as cases of the deadly pneumonic plague continue to surge. The Red Cross has warned that growing stigma attached to the disease is undermining efforts to contain the outbreak. While cases of bubonic plague occur in Madagascar nearly every year, the ‘more dangerous’ pneumonic plague has never been so rife. It arrived earlier than expected this year, and has become much more contagious with it being transmitted from person to person through the air.

Nice… airborne plague. Exactly what you want to hear, as everything else is already going to hell. I’m surprised we haven’t had calls to begin admitting refugees from there.

Interesting there is so much mortality due to it. It makes you wonder if this is antibiotic resistant, or this airborne form is just unusually fast moving.

Probably will fizzle out, but interesting to see, as I was just thinking the other day about the pre-Renaissance plague outbreaks.

Suppose a city like Chicago suddenly had to endure an economic collapse like what set off the last Great Depression.

Right now, people throw away food freely. Garbage cans are filled with pizza crusts, half-eaten candy bars, and so on. Subway tracks have all sorts of edible garbage just thrown into them. People look in their fridges and throw out food that is still edible, but out of date. Kids drop hotdogs in the park, and parents leave them and buy them another.

All of that raises the city’s carrying capacity for rodents, and allows the rodents to keep their distance from humans.

Now imagine welfare went away, everybody was always short on cash, food distribution became spotty, and everybody was always hungry, so they never threw out food. Even pizza crusts were heartily gobbled down, and the foil it was on was licked for oil and crumbs.

Now that massive rodent population meets a much smaller carrying capacity. Rodents, in search of food begin moving into human occupied spaces. Once there, many die, and their fleas hop off and move out, looking for anything warm blooded to feast on.

On top of that, the humans they encounter are all malnourished, and their immune systems are not capable of easily fighting off hostile microbes.

Suddenly, you can see how the plague hitting just as the famines started when the Medieval Warming Period ended and crop production plummeted was all no accident.

There are many paths to K, but no paths to maintain a period of extended r indefinitely.

Tell everyone about r/K Theory, because nature abhors a vacuum of K-selection