Time Magazine: Climate Change Will Make Lethal Coronavirus Epidemics More Likely

Bubonic plague is still endemic to some areas – including a region in Kazakstan where I ran a project decades ago. We stockpiled suitable antibiotics at our camp, and donated them to the local hospital when they got old – they had no such antibiotics and were very happy to get them. So much for socialism!

Bubonic plague is typically spread by rats that carry a flea infected with the bacterium Yersinia pestis. The rats also die of the disease, and often go mad and come out of hiding and do a hideous dance before falling dead. There reportedly was an old saying at the time of the Great Plague: “Beware the dancing rats!”
https://www.granger.com/results.asp?image=0020818

As an aside, my home province Alberta is supposed to be the only rat-free region on the planet. We are assured by our government that this is true, and yet there are worrying signs of change. Albertans elected a socialist NDP government, which was recently voted out of office. Also, the federal Trudeau Liberal-Marxists got elected with a minority and insist on forcing their destructive climate change fraud upon us, ruining our once-strong economy. We need to shore up our borders –Alberta is no longer rat-free.

Oops, I left out this paragraph:

It was being observed that some people in a few distinct demographics were getting a weird illness characterized by an acquired susceptibility to diseases that were very rare or caused by what are ubiquitous but typically innocuous microorganisms*, and what was an initially perplexing assortment of other symptoms

One rarely hears about the disease called hemophilia anymore, at least not in the US, although when I was younger it was a disease that got a lot of mentions and attention in the press and medical and scientific literature.
The reason is that the recessive gene that causes hemophilia was very effectively removed from the gene pool by the HIV virus.
Because in the US, a treatment that was highly effective at letting these people have a mostly normal life had become available: Clotting factor was removed from donated blood, and given as an injection to people who had this genetic disease that prevents a person from making their own clotting factor. It had to be given often. And the way it was available and affordable was because it could be done to large batches of blood in a relatively efficient way.
Someone might have well imagined that when a unit of blood was donated, it was stored until it was needed by someone, and that unit was then transfused into the patient in need.
But that method did not allow for things like clotting factor, immunoglobulins, and other substances that are in blood in small amounts, to be removed in a cost effective manner.
Or at least so it was deemed at the time.
It never occurred to the people overseeing this process that there were diseases lurking in certain individuals, and that by taking a large number of units of blood, each from a different person, and dumping it into a vat so various things could be cheaply separated out, that one person who was harboring a viral illness could thereby spread it to a large number of people…thousands and thousands of people…including nearly every single person with the gene for hemophilia in the USA.
And since the progression of a viral illness, or indeed many types of infectious organism, is very often directly related to the number of particles of the organism a person is exposed to, particularly in the case of the initial dose, someone getting a dose of a concentrated fraction of a centrifuged blood product, and getting it over and over again on a regular basis, the people who were infected by HIV in this way had an unusually rapid and severe disease progression. When someone gets only a few virions of a virus into their system, their innate immune system will be able to eliminate them all before they can reproduce in sufficient numbers to overwhelm the innate immunity. Since acquired immunity will occur and become stronger in the days and especially weeks after an initial exposure, getting only a small dosage of the infective agent can lead to a situation where a person does not even get sick, or if they do it will be a much more mild and short lived case than someone who gets a large infective dose.
The threshold for causing infection and illness is called the minimum infective dose.
This is why washing hands and other sorts of attention to hygiene can be so effective at preventing illness: If someone has the flu and you are in the same room or building for even a little while, or if you have incidental contact with a sick person…it is a virtual mathematical certainty that some particles of the disease causing organism will enter your body. But if you can keep the number of these particle to a minimum, you may get just enough to allow your body to make some antibodies before you get the next batch into your system…at which point it will strengthen your immune response still further.
This strengthening of immune response by repeated exposure when a person already has some immunity also explains another phenomenon we have seen in recent years: Back when everyone got chicken pox and measles, after one got the infection for the first time and eventually overcame it via an acquired immune response (i.e. production of protective antibodies), we would also typically be re-exposed from time to time when the disease went around again and someone you were in contact with had it. So the assumption everyone made at the time was that once someone got one of these diseases, they could not get it again, was false, as is the notion that a vaccine produces lifelong immunity as a matter of fact.
Immunity to re-infection was abetted by frequent, or at least occasional, re-exposure, giving the immune response an occasional kick or boost.
Also, at the time someone got chicken pox or measles, it is possible, perhaps likely, that they had a sub-infective dose at some point prior to getting an infective dose, leading to a less severe case of the illnesses due to having at least some antibodies to it.
And in fact it is well known that one dose of a vaccine is very often not able to provide complete immunity, which is why several doses of some vaccines are requires to provide and effective antibody titer to build up in the blood stream, lymph system, and tissues.
And most people, if they think about it, know this very well in the case of, for example, tetanus vaccine or immune booster shot (an injection of immunoglobulin antibodies). If you get a deep puncture wound and have not had a tetanus shot in many years…most people know they best get to the emergency room and get a shot of it right away, or risk a (not so very) nice little case of lockjaw from the ubiquitous soil borne organism that causes it.