Another mandatory prick is on the way

(First, it was smallpox. Photo: Steven Stehling)

from Mark:

Plague is a terrorist threat, the University of Central Florida says.

According to the university: In 2005, plague killed 56 people in the Congo, “and another 124 were infected before the epidemic was stopped.”

The disease is more likely to kill you, than if you were infected with smallpox. Mortality rates for untreated plague are well over 50 percent. For smallpox, the mortality rate is about 30 percent.

UCF has new vaccine for plague, however, which can be taken orally: making it more useful in the case of a terrorist plague attack, something scientists, writing for the Lancet last year, is something for which we should be prepared.

UCF professor develops vaccine to protect against black plague bioterror attack
A University of Central Florida researcher may have found a defense against the Black Plague, a disease that wiped out a third of Europe’s population in the Middle Ages and which government agencies perceive as a terrorist threat today.

UCF Professor Henry Daniell and his team have developed a vaccine that early research shows is highly effective against the plague. Findings of his National Institutes of Health and USDA funded research appear in the August edition of Infection and Immunity. The vaccine, which is taken orally or by injection, was given to rats at UCF and the efficacy was evaluated by measuring immunity (antibody) developed in their blood.

All untreated rats died within three days while all orally immunized animals survived this challenge with no traces of the plague in their bodies. The rats were exposed to a heavy dose of Yersinia Pestis bacteria, which causes the plague, at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Maryland. It is one of a few labs in the world authorized to store and work with the highly dangerous agent.