digging wells in Africa

 

we did a similar project when I worked in Africa in the 1970s: THe pumps were bought by a grant but the construction and digging was done by locals.

ancient epidemics

 

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...but is tularemia that infectious since it spread via ticks or contaminated meat? 

discussion here:

more here.

Modern epidemics of tularemia:

Actually I suspect it might have been bubonic plague, since it returned to the Hittites with Egyptian POWs...

diseases change: they often get less virulent with time, so the esymptomes might be diffrent.

And sometimes one wonders if anyone has common sense: The famous story in the Bible about the Philistines retuning the Arc of the Covenant because of an epidemic of hemorrhods, and which included golden mice with the arc, is obviously a mistranslation: Bubos in the groin (necrotic abcesses) are not the same as hemorrhoids, but I can't think of any fatal epidemic that causes heorrhoids, so I suspect this is a mistranslation.

the US Military has several books on biological warfare including which disease could be used. The Black death was used by the Mongols and attributed to the spreaed in Europe. The Japanese experiments in China during world war II including cholera and tularemia killed an estimated 400 thousand civilians.

the only biological attack on the USA was when the Germans introduced foot and mouth disease into the USA during World War I, or the cult that infected salads with salmonella to make people too sick to vote against them in an election...

the animal diseases are also a threat: a lot of the beriberi during the Philippine was against Spain and then the USA was because there was an epidemic of foot and mouth disease that killed the animals that were used to plant rice, and the imported white rice lacked the vitamin of brown rice, so people died of beriberi.