The
bubonic plague killed maybe 200 million people long ago in Europe as
it emerged from the early middle ages. European sanitation was crude
and the people ignorant. They traded and warred promiscuously and
allowed plague infected rats to be thrown over the protective city
walls of Constantinople by Muslims. Trading ships carried infected
rats all over Europe. People died, were carted up, piled up and
burned. Eventually, after a few centuries, researchers started
looking for inoculations against the plague. And they were found.
Vaccines
don't usually work forever. Today the government won't let people get
smallpox inoculations as they did in the 1960s. When biological war
crisis occurs however there may be too little time to react.
The
Soviets worked on combining different biowar pathogens in its
biopreparat program. One double virus combinations would infect
someone with the pneumonic plague, and if they survived, kill them
with something like smallpox. As late as 1999 some biowar research
facility remained in Russia. Much of the old stuff was taken to
Siberia and buried where no one besides terrorists might find it.
A
vaccine against the bubonic plague was tested during the Vietnam War
and it apparently worked. It didn't last forever though and its
production was discontinued. The military needed something that would
work against the better military weaponized version of the pneumonic
plague.
The
pneumonic plague is an airborne virus. Soviet scientists sought to
decrease its size so that it could be inhaled. If a viral agent is
too larger the body tends to filter it out. They wouldn't be carried
so well on the wind either. Probably researches were successful at
reducing the size of pneumonic plague agents.
Three
new vaccines appear to work against the bubonic and pneumonic plague.
The plague Y.
pestis attacks
the immune system. H.I.V. attacks the immune system in a different
way, yet several adverse agents attack the immune system and a
weakened immune system renders one more susceptible to attacks from
additional invasive agents that may present. Genetic manipulation
exacerbates the problem of creating lasting vaccines since opfor
biologists can manufacture multi-drug resistant strains.
Probably
it is better to let people be inoculated while they can in case the
unexpected occurs, rather than to wait, I would think. It is
difficult to know what new form of completely synthetic agent may be
devised next.
