The Black Plague Batted .500 Its Rookie Year

ElDuderino44137 writes "Hey, kids, got the summer blues? The CIA isn't the only one with a kids' page to keep you busy. The Centers for Disease Control have the full set of collectible infectious disease trading cards. Mix 'em, match 'em, trade 'em, recoil in abject horror from 'em."

Comments

Criminal collectable cards

[Bob_Robertson]

Here I thought that those "Most Awful Criminals" cards were in bad taste.

Reading the back of the Anthrax card, it's just propaganda for kids to show mommy and daddy so they won't defund the CDC.

Bob-

Re:Criminal collectable cards

[MindStalker]

How is stating that anthrax has been used in bioterrorism propaganda. It really did happen you know.

Kids these days...

[I_Love_Pocky!]

Get all of the cool toys. Why didn't they have this when I was growing up?

Clearly, designed for children

[jtheory]

...by people who don't have a great understanding of children.

I think this would have given me nightmares when I was a kid (check out page 2, with the thick white membrane in the throat of the Diptheria sufferer, or the backwards-bent leg of the Polio girl)... but I think the helpful translations of scientific words would have made up for it. This snippet (from the Cyclosporiasis blurb) is a fine example:

You may get this disease from eating food or swallowing water that has been contaminated with feces (poop). About a week after you get this parasite, you may start to feel sick and have diarrhea.

Yeah, I'm sure the kid knows what "contaminated" means... come on, guys. Though I will forgive them not trying to explain "diarrhea" using small words.

Re:Pet Peeve

[cephyn]

that second link tries to say it wasnt plague, but pretty much ends up saying it was -- they say the symptoms COULD be from plague but MIGHT not have been. And its been well documented that plague can EASILY spread from human to human, especially in pneumonic form. And plague infection could display symptoms very similar to hemo fever in septecemic form. bubonic plague is one type of infection from yersinia pestis. Pneumonic is a different one (lungs) and septecemic is the third (blood) -- septecemic has been documented as being the nastiest, killing 90% in 24-36 hours, causes bleeding like a hemo fever, and is passed through body fluids (like vomiting blood).

So the articles are saying that the spread was too fast for plague, but there are types of plague infections which could do it. They say not enough rats died, but there are plenty of documented events of mass rat death during the Black Death. They wonder why it spread most on roads, well, rats often hid in wagons filled with hay or food, or crawled in leaving fleas behind, etc etc etc. And it may have spread animal to animal in the outlying areas, but animals don't often write things down. People do, and they concentrate on roads and towns.

Those articles, IMO, are sketchy AT BEST.

Re:huh?

[zaroastra]

fast google search will render you:
this, and this

The true nature of the "Black Death" was long a mystery, but early in the 20th Century, after doctors had found and described bubonic plague in India, experts jumped to the conclusion that a more virulent form of that disease, endemic in rats and transmitted to humans by their fleas, was the real culprit.
This was a comforting conclusion, because it meant it was a bacterial disease with a complicated life cycle, easily contained by hygiene and antibiotics. But it never actually made sense, because the standard treatment for the Black Death, tried and tested over three hundred years, was to quarantine affected families and villages for forty days. That could not have worked if it were carried by rats, which do not respect quarantines. So two years ago Professors Christopher Duncan and Susan Scott of Liverpool University suggested in their book, Biology of Plagues, that the Black Death was really an Ebola like virus, a haemorrhagic fever transmitted directly from person to person.

Re:Anyone remember asking for the Plague?

[LSD-25]

Why couldn't you say, "I'm looking for a book called 'Sex in the Snow.'"