Quote:
Originally Posted by Cadence
Thanks, I had never heard the term. Sounds like a reference to the black plague. I thought that was fleas from rats only thought to be airborne?
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The Black Death aka Plague, thought to be due to infection by the bacterium
Yersina pestis, can be transmitted in any of several ways.
One way was by an insect vector such as a flea, moving between infected
animals (whether rodents or humans - but the rat was easily blamed) and transferring the bacteria when it bit the
animals. When the
Yersina infection developed, buboes (swollen lymph nodes) formed on the infected person, leading to the name 'bubonic plaque'.
Another of the several means of transfer of
Yersina pestis is by droplet or aerosol. And that led to the name 'pneumonic plague'. That airborne infection
route is recorded in so-called nursery
songs with lines such as 'Ring around a rosie, a pocketful of posies, atishoo atishoo we all fall down' to show the link between lack of physical distancing, sneezing, and death.
In the
USA, deaths from
Yersina pestis are few, 1 - 4 a year (the new case number averages 7 a year, usually in the range of 1 - 17 new cases each year). Mostly the bubonic form and not pneumonic plague (it takes a human to sneeze within close proximity to get successful transfer of the pneumonic plague; a lot of the human cases in the US are males working outdoors in more-or-less solitary fashion).
Plague in the US is understood to have been introduced to North America by rats travelling by ship across the Atlantic from
Europe. Those rats then spread
Yersina from urban areas to rodents in rural areas and it's in those rural areas of New
Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado that Yersina seems to have remained within wild rodent species for at least one century now. In good years for rodents,
Yersina cases sometimes occur in the human population in
California and even Nevada.
As for political discourse in Australia: I'd discount anyone who comments on the nature of political discourse in any polity without a broad-ranging opinion
survey for supporting data.
As in the US, the bulk of the Australian population is urban and is split by
race, religion, class, caste, gender, and more. The big difference between the US and Aus is that most Aus hail from one of the tiny number of big cities; a very much larger proportion of USAns hail from any of the large number of small cities, towns, and whatever.
Most all the Aus CF members are urban whites. 21% of Australians are non-white non-indigenes. So the CF population (with one or two rare exceptions, one of whom I've not seen active for several months) are from that other 79%. In Australia, theoretically almost all citizens over 18 years age have registered to vote and are legally required to attend a polling place at election time (or make a gesture at lodging a vote by other means). The proportion of the population that is disengaged from the voting process and politics has risen dramatically in recent decades.
So when you're reading what CF members write, try to think who they are and from where they come. The blow-ins from the US, Jim and Ann, rarely make comment on Aus politics. Look at the others and try to
work out the state or big city from which they hail. Melbourne and
Sydney are dominant - one is the 19th century city of modernity; the other is the 18-19th century city of the
English colonial officer and gentry class. Look for CF members from
Queensland, the northeastern state. It's the most decentralised, with a string of small cities and large towns along its coast. And note the few from Perth and its state of Western Australia.
You'll note big differences in opinion from the Melbourne (Bleak City) & Sydney (the Big Smoke) on the one hand and the QLDers on the other. The Perth/West Aus people are another oddity.
The old narrative about white settlers in Aus went like this: the ship from Europe made first port at a small town near Perth (West Aus), and only the most adventurous disembarked; then the ship went to the city of modernity, Melbourne, with goldfields and private entrepreneurs galore, so the like-minded liberal and entrepreneurial thinkers disembarked; the establishment and wealthy continued to the next port, Sydney, in hope that it would prove better than Melbourne (and be more British and upper class), so the majority of what was left disembarked; the past port of call was
Brisbane (or sometimes Maryborough), when the crew had to pry the fingers of the unwilling from the
mast and toss them ashore.
A few other
ports and states - Tasmania, Adelaide in S Aus - do not fit in that narrative. Nor does Darwin (in N Territory) or the federal capital.
To be like an Aussie (at least a white urban one), you'd now set yourself a drinking
game. You'd get a sheet of paper and draw up a table of the prolific CF posters from Aus, with your best guess about their home state and hailing port/city. Then you'd have columns of the political spectrum. And you'd put check marks to mark your guesses about the ideational content of their posts. You'd have a set of rules: you'd perhaps down a shot each time a CF user with a cap-R in their name made a individualistic/right-wing comment ... and so on.
Australia has had
Yersina cases in the past. Unlike the US, wild or native animals do not sustain a population of the bacterium.
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