Think of it as Yoga for the brain, we are going to stretch a bit.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of the Plague
Seven hundred years ago we fought plague with fear. Today we fight it with facts. --YNOT!
Human beings have an interesting relationship with disaster.
We spend centuries being terrified of something, eventually figure out how to defeat it, and then promptly forget why everyone was terrified in the first place.
The plague is a pretty good example.
THE UGLY
Let’s start with the ugly, because the plague certainly earned its reputation.
The bacterium Yersinia pestis was responsible for the Black Death, the great plague pandemic that tore through Europe in the 14th century.
The World Health Organization estimates that the Black Death killed more than 50 million people in Europe alone.
Think about that for a moment. 0Europe did not have hundreds of millions of people.
In some areas, an enormous percentage of the population simply disappeared.
The bacteria showed remarkably little respect for social status.
That may be the closest nature ever came to introducing a truly universal tax.
And the plague didn’t simply vanish after the famous Black Death. It returned repeatedly over the following centuries.
There are three major forms.
Bubonic plague attacks the lymphatic system and produces the famous painful swollen lymph nodes called buboes.
Septicemic plague gets into the bloodstream.
And then there is the particularly nasty one: Pneumonic plague.
That means the bacteria have gotten into the lungs.
Unlike ordinary bubonic plague, pneumonic plague can spread from one person to another through infectious respiratory particles. The disease can progress extremely rapidly. Untreated pneumonic plague can become fatal within roughly 18 to 24 hours after symptoms begin.
That’s the ugly.
THE BAD
The bad news is that the plague never actually went away. It is still here.
Yersinia pestis survives naturally in populations of rodents and their fleas.
Human cases continue to occur.
Madagascar, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Peru remain among the countries where plague is endemic, and Madagascar records bubonic-plague cases nearly every year during its plague season.
Even the United States occasionally gets cases.
So when you hear the word plague, you aren’t hearing about some extinct medieval disease like something dug up beside a Viking helmet.
The bug is still very much employed. Which brings us to Russia.
In October 2026, a 28-year-old laboratory worker at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute in Siberia died after developing pneumonia of undetermined origin.
That is a sentence containing several words that you generally prefer not to see together:
laboratory worker – anti-plague institute – Siberia – pneumonia –died
Authorities initially placed roughly 200 contacts under observation or quarantine, and the case attracted the attention of the World Health Organization and governments outside Russia.
Naturally, the Internet immediately did what the Internet does best.
It filled in all the missing information with information it had invented.
There were stories about broken test tubes, laboratory accidents and pneumonic plague.
As of October 7, however, those claims have not been established as fact.
Russian health authorities say nearly 5,000 tests found no dangerous pathogen, no plague cases have been found among the woman’s contacts, and WHO currently considers the broader public-health risk low. The exact cause of the woman’s fatal pneumonia remains unresolved publicly.
So this is worth watching.
It is not, based on the evidence presently available, the beginning of the Black Death II.
And there is an enormous difference between those two statements.
THE GOOD
Now comes the remarkable part.
If you caught the plague in 1350, your medical options were approximately:
Pray.
Pray harder.
Have somebody bleed you.
Discover that numbers one through three hadn’t worked.
Today we have something medieval doctors would have regarded as witchcraft:
antibiotics.
Plague is a bacterial infection.
And Yersinia pestis is generally susceptible to antibiotics.
WHO states plainly that modern antibiotics and supportive therapy are effective when plague is diagnosed and treated promptly.
That doesn’t mean pneumonic plague is harmless.
Quite the opposite.
It is a medical emergency because it moves extraordinarily quickly.
But today the problem is generally not that we lack a treatment.
The problem is recognizing it quickly enough to begin treatment.
Pneumonic plague usually causes a rapidly developing pneumonia with symptoms such as: fever, headache, severe weakness, shortness of breath, chest pain, cough, and sometimes bloody or watery mucus.
Unfortunately, that list also describes approximately seventeen other diseases that nobody wants.
So a doctor doesn’t look at someone coughing and announce:
“Ah yes, clearly the Black Death.”
Exposure history matters enormously.
Were you around infected rodents?
Were you bitten by fleas in an area where plague occurs?
Were you in close contact with someone known to have pneumonic plague?
Or, perhaps somewhat unusually, do you work in a laboratory that studies plague?
Confirmation requires laboratory testing of blood, sputum or material from an infected lymph node.
AND HERE IS THE REALLY INTERESTING PART
The bacteria haven’t changed enough to explain the enormous difference between 1350 and 2026.
We changed. We learned about bacteria.
We learned about fleas. We learned sanitation.
We learned epidemiology. We developed laboratories.
We developed antibiotics. We developed public-health surveillance.
We learned to isolate infected patients. We learned to trace contacts.
We learned that diseases aren’t curses, punishments from God, bad air or the result of your neighbor owning an unusually suspicious-looking cat.
Knowledge changed the equation.
The same organism that once helped erase entire communities can now frequently be defeated with medicine that sits on pharmacy shelves around the world.
That might be one of the greatest demonstrations of the value of science in human history.
THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY
The ugly: Plague was one of the greatest killers humanity has ever encountered.
The bad: It never disappeared. It still exists in nature, and pneumonic plague remains an extraordinarily dangerous disease when untreated.
The good: 0We know what causes it. We know how it spreads. We know how to detect it. And most importantly, we know how to treat it.
Seven hundred years ago, humanity faced the plague largely with superstition and fear.
Today we face it with microscopes, laboratories, epidemiology and antibiotics.
The bacteria are still here. The difference is that this time… Now we know what we’re doing. We Hope!
One factual change I deliberately made from the earlier discussion: I would not call the Russian case a confirmed pneumonic-plague death. As of October 7, that remains unconfirmed, while Russian authorities report no detected plague among contacts and WHO assesses the wider risk as low.
WHY DO WE STILL DO GAIN-OF-FUNCTION RESEARCH?
Gain-of-function research is a broad term for experiments in which scientists deliberately change an organism so it acquires a new or enhanced biological characteristic. In infectious-disease research, that can sometimes mean studying changes that affect how a pathogen grows, infects cells, evades immunity, resists drugs, or spreads. The reason scientists still do this kind of work is that understanding what mutations make a pathogen more dangerous can help us recognize those mutations in nature, develop better vaccines and treatments, and prepare for future outbreaks before they happen. The National Academies has noted potential benefits including better disease surveillance, understanding drug resistance and immune escape, developing animal models, and improving some vaccine research.
But this is also where science gets uncomfortable. Some gain-of-function experiments involving potentially pandemic pathogens can create a theoretical risk that an altered organism could escape accidentally or be deliberately misused. That is why this field has produced years of argument over whether certain experiments provide enough scientific benefit to justify their biosafety and biosecurity risks.
In plain English: we sometimes make a dangerous organism more capable in a controlled laboratory because understanding how nature could do the same thing may help us defend against it. The controversy is whether gaining that knowledge is always worth creating the thing we are afraid of.
