Patient Zero"?

Austin Bay from StrategyPage:

Background: 28-year-old Shipilova, Russia's latest patient zero, worked in the "Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East."\

 Check the map. Irkutsk appears to be a long way from everywhere. Except it's not.

 Presumably, Shipilova died from pneumonic plague. But maybe she didn't. 

According to the Russian bureaucrats responsible for investigating her death (Federal Service for the Oversight of Consumer Protection and Welfare, Rospotrebnadzor), "No micro-organisms associated with the employee's professional duties were detected in samples taken from the patient." Bureaucrats usually avoid facts......

 Unfortunately, deadly bugs and big jets present a challenge. With the advent of long-range aviation, contagious disease can move from local to global in hours. The rapid spread of disease delivered by air connections is an Age of Proximity downside....

Shipilova worked in a known biological weapons lab. The COVID-19 epidemic and the downright misleading governmental responses to the epidemic definitely shape global responses to Shipilova's death.//

and then there is history:

During the Cold War, Russian imperialists (wearing Soviet Communist masks) experimented with anthrax (also called woolsorter's disease) as an agro-terror and anti-human bioweapon. April 2, 1979: Inept labbies released "aerosolized anthrax spores" from a research facility in Sverdlovsk. An estimated 100 people died, in the immediate area.

Is China worried about the Russian Plague outbreak

 

Plague part two

vaccine opposition

 

....

a lot of famous people opposed vaccine for smallpox in the early 1900s, and I should note that vaccinia did have a small but sometimes fatal side effect.

However, smallpox was highly fatal and the use of using mild smallpox pus to vaccinate people before Jenner found cowpox worked was a big debate in the 1700

Lady Montague helped popularize this in England after she saw it used by the Turks. But in the USA, the practice was introduced by Cotton Mather (yes the one behind the witch trials who later repented) because his black slave told him how it was used in Africa.

and one reason Canada is not part of the US was because the American army had many smallpox casualties. However, George Washington knew about innoculation and implemented smallpox innoculation of his army.

Japan public health

 

....

actually hot baths might help: Raising the body temperature will kill the germ, hence the use of malaria to cure neurosyphillis in the days before treatment became available. Then there was mercury treatment:

Pysortherapy article on Wikipedia: THe problem is that you need 105 degrees. One way to get the temperature this high is using malaria.

why mosuitoes love me

Bioethics has a problem

a summary of Cardinal Sarah's lecture to the European Parliement is found at Catholic thing.