The Plague: 5 Things to Know

I decided against showing the increasingly unhinged takes that hit my Threads and Twitter feeds but, suffice to say, it is both easy, normal, and rewarded to have scary takes on the internet...let's try something different...looking at what we actually know (rather than what my brain is making up) and determining whether any of that is scary. Edited by Digital Gator: https://bsky.app/profile/digigator.bsky.social SOURCESSS How y pestis works: https://www.cdc.gov/plague/signs-symptoms/index.html Bubonic plague: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/plague Plague in the US: https://www.cdc.gov/plague/causes/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/plague/maps-statistics/index.html Madagascar’s 2017 outbreak: https://www.who.int/emergencies/disease-outbreak-news/item/27-november-2017-plague-madagascar-en Pneumonic plague is bad: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/rr/rr7003a1.htm Person-to-person transmission - close, sustained contact and we've not seen asymptomatic transmission: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/rr/rr7003a1.htm Sharing rooms without transmission: https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/12/3/05-1051_article Plague was controlled before antibiotics by improved hygeine: https://royalsociety.org/blog/2019/04/third-plague-pandemic-europe/ Plague outbreak control: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/rr/rr7003a1.htm https://www.who.int/emergencies/disease-outbreak-news/item/27-november-2017-plague-madagascar-en The Black Death killed an ~ 30–50% of Europe: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8488627/ Evidence of lethal plague outbreaks among hunter-gatherers dates back ~ 5,500 years: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42310115/ The Irkutsk governor report: https://www.rte.ie/news/world/2026/1005/1594093-russia-plague/ No reported secondary cases: https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/news-events/ecdc-closely-monitoring-situation-following-case-pneumonia-unknown-origin-russia Previous plague responses in Russia: https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/russian-boy-contracts-bubonic-plague/48xlpcqv3 https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-07-russia-urges-marmot-plague.html https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/27/bubonic-plague-outbreak-feared-central-asia