Pneumonic plague update: possible outbreak in the Seychelles
The patient is a Seychellois man who came back from Madagascar on an Air Seychelles flight on Friday 6th October. So far there is only one confirmed patient with the pneumonic plague in the Seychelles. His close friends, family and other persons which he had contact with are placed in quarantine and some of the quarantined persons have developed fever and other pneumonic plague symptoms.
The world has kind of forgot about the plague, in the sense that we learn about it at history classes, but tend not to realize the cruel impact it had on entire civilizations. There's no consensus under scientist about the timeline of the disease as there are different waves of the plague, the discussion is about whether it's one and the same or there are different DNA plague strings. It's not really important for now as I just wanted to point out that there is many things unknown about the most deadly disease in our history.
As a infected man was able to travel from Madagascar to the Seychelles it makes you wonder. Airborne infections are easily spread within an airplane through the air ventilation and filtration systems. With this knowledge in mind, why haven't the Madagascar authorities (and the UN security council) shut down their international airport, in order to contain the spread of the plague. It takes one sick passenger, who infect other persons on the airplane, and those fellow travelers switching planes at different international airport. And, voila, there will be a global outbreak.
Luckily there are some antibiotics which kills the plague bacteria, but you have to start with the antibiotics within 24 hours of the infection. Here starts another problem, because almost all the doctors in the world have never diagnosed a pneumonic plague patient. This makes it much more dangerous as infected patients might be send home as a malaria patient and then will be able to infect more patient. This is by the way how patient zero acted. He thought he had malaria.
In the meantime, nobody reports about this, except some random WHO message. The world powers should act now, before it will be too late. Better be a little too preventive, than to hold on a laissez-faire policy. Usually I would have the government at fair distance away from me, but now is a time they should act and send their best medical teams to Madagascar. As they did with the recent Ebola outbreak in western Africa. Perhaps governments have a different agenda? Let's wait and see. In the mean time, don't travel to Madagascar or Seychelles, follow the latest updates on WHO.int, get some emergency stock and definitely buy a mouth cap.
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