Yersinia

Okay.

Of all the bacteria in the world, Yersinia pestis, which is the causative agent of plague-

Mm-hmm

... is the deadliest, the most virulent, and in the case of the plague strains that the Soviets worked with, the most transmissible, okay? It's a perfect storm for a biological weapons agent without doing anything to it, although they did do things to it, of course.

So it is a very highly adapted pathogen to its reservoirs, and it also is a very effective agent when it gets into people, okay? It is extremely virulent.

If you've had plague for a couple of days, it replaces all of the organs in your body with tissues.

Get a pure culture of Yersinia pestis colonies, and it's mind-blowing how virulent this thing is.

It just replaces the host of, you know, the host's organs with these-

There was some concern that this was a result of pneumonic plague.

And to be clear again, pneumonic plague is a, uh, is a disease that is caused by the bacterium, um, Yersinia pestis.

Uh, most people are familiar with the bubonic plague that happened during the 13th and 14th centuries, which is that same bacterium, Yersinia pestis, uh, when it, somebody receives a flea bite from an inflect- in a flea that has been infected with Yersinia.

Pneumonic plague, uh, is, is the same bacterium, but it is not from a flea bite.

It's when that bacterium gets into the individual's lungs and can cause a very rapid, very fulminant, and, uh, quite lethal pneumonia.

I, I think we don't really know what happened.

Uh, we don't know why this woman died.

If it was Yersinia pestis- Why d- was she not treated with antibiotics or the appropriate antibiotics, or is it that, you know, this is somehow resistant? I don't know.

[laughs]

I mean, it just, you know, we're, we're sticklers, and I think we should all be sticklers, and I think maybe our listeners are like, "What do you mean?" You know, so they found the, the bacteria, the Yersinia pestis, that causes-

Plague

... that causes plague.

Um, I mean, we even hear that there might be a second person that died of pneumonia in this area.

So-

So can, can Yersinia cause pneumonia?

Um, so i- there's two types of, um, Yersinia.

So the plague is actually a specific disease.

It- it's caused by a bacterium called Yersinia pestis.

Um, it has been a cause of, of human pandemics throughout human history, right? And the Black Death and, uh, in the Middle Ages, it was, it was pretty devastating.

It would kill a third, half of the population.

Why does it matter in this case that it was a lab infection? Why is that a particularly frightening or important possibility?

Yeah.

So, um, it's not just a lab that, quote unquote, "works on plague." I think you have to ask, like, what exactly does it do? And if we go back 20, 30 years to the fall of the Soviet Union and some of the, the lab workers and lab directors who defected around that time, they made it very clear, and our intelligence community also assesses, that these labs are working on manipulating or modifying the plague, uh, vi- uh, sorry, bacteria, Yersinia, to be either antibiotic resistant, uh, or to be, uh, more deadly.

We don't know if that's what was happening here.

This is very serious.

Yersinia, we s- sometimes see scattered cases, uh, Jonathan, in the United States in the southwestern US.

It causes a severe acute respiratory distress syndrome, so usually an ICU stay is all but mandated, especially if you don't have early treatment with antibiotics that work well for this.

But I mean, that, that in and of itself should give us a sense of the risk to the US population.