John Moore
2009-02-04 10:13:25
If the disease really was pneumonic plague, it is not as ominous as it sounds.
Just last year a field biologist died of pneumonic plague contracted at the Grand Canyon. It spread to nobody else.
The disease is deadly but in the modern world, epidemics would be prevented or quickly contained.
As another poster wrote, without weaponization, it is also highly susceptible to antibiotics. Also, the yersinia pestis pathogen is common (and thus available to a determined searcher) in the western third of the United States, having been introduced in 1900 at San Francisco.
