The World Health Organization has noted that plague has a high fatality rate, but is also easily treated with antibiotics and the use of precautions to prevent infections.
Yes, but that becomes less relevant if it's more of a Plague Research Institute than an Anti-Plague Research Institute,
or if they've been messing around with stuff they shouldn't really have been.
or even if they were doing legitimate research into, say, bacterial resistance
The Irkutsk Anti-Plague institute is a genuine anti-plague research centre (and other nasties like cholera, brucellosis, tularemia and anthrax). They are actually a fairly well recognised institution in that regard with a lot of cross border collaboration, primarily with mongolia and china, but also some with the west.
The bad news is that this lab used to be part of the soviet biowarfare programme that was very much inherited by russia.
The good news within the bad news is that this was not one of the labs that explicity focused on offensive biowarfare before everything went all secretive because the UN banned it.
Ultimately this was very likely an organic leak, but unfortunately the possibility is not zero of this being a spicier version, either deliberately made as a weapon, or being used to try and pre-empt the bioweapons russias enemies might seek to use.
Interesting. I was not familiar with the facility. The fact that it has a name probably means it's not the worst one out there.
I didn't mean to imply it was either going to be a new pandemic, or that the russians were exceptionally careless. As some of these other comments seem to think.
It was also something that Obama banned the government from funding. Then trump and the republicans took over and started a trade war in 2016. To get concessions from China, the trump administration offered to allow funding of Gain of Function research facilities, including the Wuhan facility.
That's right, Fauci could only approve funding for that because of trump's idiocy.
It won't ever reach that far. It gets out of the building, it's dead. Long as you keep infected quarantined or given a doseage of 5.56mm russian painkillers
“Long as you keep the infected quarantined” is doing A LOT of heavy lifting here… Siberia or Mars, it lives in the infected people after it gets out of the building.
right, cause my question is if it's easily treatable with antibiotics (and presumably doctors know how to identify it / this technician would have known what she was handling), then why did she die?
Bad luck mostly. Timing, co-morbidities, genetic predispositions, whatever. Sometimes healthy people can be brought down by a bug that was just a minor inconvenience to most other people.
And it’s the fuckin plague at the end of the day. Far more treatable than it was 700 years ago, but it’s still not the kind of thing we want to tangle with.
A pathogen needs to meet some fairly specific criteria, AND get out into the general public to become a pandemic. So far i see no indication that this could become one.
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u/Firefly_deadlock 7h ago
Yes, but that becomes less relevant if it's more of a Plague Research Institute than an Anti-Plague Research Institute,
or if they've been messing around with stuff they shouldn't really have been.
or even if they were doing legitimate research into, say, bacterial resistance