photo credit: Daquella manera

Outbreaks of resurging or new infectious diseases – many from foreign countries – kill more than 170,000 people in America each year. That’s a pretty scary statistic. Newly discovered global pandemics or even bio-terrorist attacks, are a real threat to the security of the nation. How would you be prepared for such a medical catastrophe should it happen? What would you do to protect your family in the case of a bio-terrorist attack? These are questions that our parents and grandparents didn’t have to deal with. It’s only in the past decade or so that these outbreaks have become a viable threat to our life.

Even the Plague Can Happen Here

Something as medieval as the plague can happen again. There have been recent outbreaks of pneumonic plague even in the United States. While the cases were diagnosed and quickly treated, there’s no way of predicting what would happen if it occurred in another country where the medical treatments couldn’t handle the problem quickly enough. The disease would spread at a phenomenal rate and eventually end up on our shore. Pneumonic plague is usually fatal in 65% of cases – even with proper medical treatment. Epidemics such as influenza, HIV, West Nile virus and SARS have become real medical threats in the past few years, with varying success of treating and slowing the spread of the diseases.

(more…)