Worldwide epidemic

I was thinking their are several diseases that have ridiculously high mortality rates and high infection rates too.
AIDS, Ebola, Marburg etc etc
Also in biological warfare even deadlier ones have been created, and in one science experiment in Australia a perfectly harmless bacteria was turned into a lethal killer accidently.

What if their was a worldwide epedemic from 1950- onwards (where mass travel could infect the world or entire continents fairly instantaneously)? A modern day black death. How long could it rage before a cure was found or all people without natural immunisation died out?

A few aware governments could seal all their borders in time or remote countries being untouched maybe? How would this effect the balance of power amongst nations? Mongolia or New Zealand become world players perhaps?

The a few instances I can thing of the top of my head, the 1976(i think) outbreak in Zaire isn't controlled and a ebola outbreak spreads across Africa, then too Europe and N.America.
S.America, China, India, Australia and the Soviet Union are the major world players with western Europe losing 8/10s of its population and US/Canada 7/10s.

Or during the 1990s destruction of the Soviet Union a killer disease escapes from a Omsk biological research station devestating most of Asia.

I dunno Im just tossing round some ideas. I think a AH epedemic would be a good exscuse too randomly change the balance of power between nations and dramatically alter the world in a short time.

Losing 70-80% of the population in the 1950's might well destroy civilization. Industrial civilization anyway.

Losing 10-20% of the population in the 1950's might even result in a 'better' world circa present day. Look at Europe after the Black Plague - more opportunities for social advancement and a greater demand for labor and all that jazz.

President Ledyard said:

Losing 70-80% of the population in the 1950's might well destroy civilization. Industrial civilization anyway.

Losing 10-20% of the population in the 1950's might even result in a 'better' world circa present day. Look at Europe after the Black Plague - more opportunities for social advancement and a greater demand for labor and all that jazz.

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Plus a lower population would result in less strain on resources and the environment.

I was thinking more too the effect that certain areas through location/goodmanagement/luck would manage too retain large parts of their population while other countries would be completly destroyed by disease.

Near empty countries with resources/hospitable climates would find themselves under conquest by those with large populations. Maybe a new age of colonisation.

Also it got me thinking that technology and science might be stalled for a number of years as population shrinks.

First, I'll interject that Ebola, Marburg, and the other hemorrhagic fevers are actually terribly candidates for epidemic disease. Their rate of lethality is so high and so swift that it's quite difficult for each infected person to average more than one infectee before succumbing. A bird flu, or a Soviet-engineered multi-resistant pneumonic plague, might be better candidates; the former has a longer incubation time, and the latter a much greater infectiousness (since the bacteria, especially if bred to spore, can survive much harsher conditions for much longer).

For example:
In the 80's, the Soviets manage to get a strain of plague which is resistant to all antibiotics of which they can get samples, and to introduce to this strain a plasmid from anthrax containing the sporing gene. Such a plague can be stored on a shelf as spores, can infect through inhalation, ingestion, or cutaneous contact, and should have a mortality rate of 80%.

In the confused days surrounding the slow fall of the Soviet Union, this plague gets out. One strain abandons the sporing behaviour, spreading to Southeast Asia through the traditional vectors of lice and other pests. Given its resistance to treatment, and the even greater population densities present in this era, this plague exceeds the Black Death in lethality, wiping out fully one third of the populations of China, India, Indonesia, and the various -stans over the course of the next decade. Japan manages to avoid this cataclysm through a draconian quarantine policy.

The original strain hits Europe, operating mostly as a pneumonic infection. Unfortunately, this strain retains its sporing capability, and (coupled with the prevalence of mass transit in Western Europe) manages to quickly spread throughout the region, and into major transport nexi in the Americas. Again, the engineered immunity to antibiotics limits treatment to the symptoms, and the astonishingly rapid spread of the plague (thanks to air recycling systems in planes, trains, and depots for both) makes effective quarantine impossible. Roughly one third of the populations of the United States and the countries of Western Europe are killed; those areas with greater geographic isolation, such as northern Canada, sub-Saharan Africa, and much of inland South America are relatively untouched.

Hell Week

IIRC, a local pharmaceutical company called that their 'Oh, Shit' Scenario...

Lead time on mega-dose production of a vaccine can be longer than the spreading time.

At one stage, when it looked like Bird Flu was going to 'Epidemic', they made contingency plans to quarantine staff within their production facility, just so they could keep the process running...

And, yes, they joked they'd watch zombie & disaster movies back-to-back off-shift...

BurningWickerman said:

in one science experiment in Australia a perfectly harmless bacteria was turned into a lethal killer accidently.

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That was mousepox, IIRC.

wow, a global killer epidemic, huh? I can see that happening.. and then the good Christian survivors would gather in Colorado... and the bad Satanic ones would gather in Las Vegas.... and the bad ones will get wiped out when a crazy pyromaniac drags a nuke into town and the Hand of God sets it off.....
wait, that's been done already....

I think the nukes might get sent off a bit earlier, before their respective governments vanish. I keep thinking of the opening scene in "Outbreak", but on a much grander scale...

Dave Howery said:

wow, a global killer epidemic, huh? I can see that happening.. and then the good Christian survivors would gather in Colorado... and the bad Satanic ones would gather in Las Vegas.... and the bad ones will get wiped out when a crazy pyromaniac drags a nuke into town and the Hand of God sets it off.....
wait, that's been done already....

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The Stand sucks by the way, and King wasn't the first to come up with a worldwide plague scenario by a long shot.

Marburg in Angola:

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7227

Note:

"After a five to 10 day incubation period, Marburg virus causes fever, muscle aches, vomiting and diarrhoea amongst other symptoms. It can lead to bleeding and multiple organ failure."

A five to ten day incubation period might not be so terrible in Angola, but let that sucker get loose where we have planes, trains, subways, and sports arenas, and we could have a problem....

Currently the largest ever Marburg outbreak is happenning in Northern Angola. At last count over 150 people had died.Link

JimmyJimJam said:

The Stand sucks by the way, and King wasn't the first to come up with a worldwide plague scenario by a long shot.

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You are Correct:

Wasn't there a movie in 1950's with Vincent Price, about a worldwide plague, oh I forgot, C. Heston did the same movie in the 1970's, about blood to blood virus, and he was the last man on earth, with the cure for the virus, can't remember the name of the movies.

Of course then there's Executive Orders and Rainbow Six...

All the ZPG fans would like to see the world lose a few people. One thing to consider, if you lost 25% of the population you could probable continue, as long as the 25% didn't include the majority of the technicians. (Just think how things would be if there was only a very few people left in the country who could repair a computer or handle the communications technology associated with the internet and cell phones?)

orion900 said:

You are Correct:

Wasn't there a movie in 1950's with Vincent Price, about a worldwide plague, oh I forgot, C. Heston did the same movie in the 1970's, about blood to blood virus, and he was the last man on earth, with the cure for the virus, can't remember the name of the movies.

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Not sure if the Price movie was "Masque of The Red Death" or something, but the Heston was "Omega Man"....

Jeremiah, on the Space Station, is about the "big death", where a plague killed everyone over the age of puberty. And yet, they have people who can operate all weapons, computers, etc.... hum!

Edgar Allen Poe wrote about a red Death. A big ball where everyone danced a final dance.

Weapon M said:

Not sure if the Price movie was "Masque of The Red Death" or something, but the Heston was "Omega Man"....

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"The Last Man on Earth" (1964) is the Vincent Price movie--"Omega Man" is virtually a remake of it--even down to the infected people looking and acting like vampires theme that they have in both movies....

sbegin: Yeah--I brought up the 'Jeremiah' series in an old thread somewhere. I find it okay but the quality of the show has suffered quite a bit since the early episodes--I honestly still have trouble wrapping my mind around why there would be fights over resources given the massive die-off depicted in the show.

Doctor What said:

"The Last Man on Earth" (1964) is the Vincent Price movie--"Omega Man" is virtually a remake of it--even down to the infected people looking and acting like vampires theme that they have in both movies....

sbegin: Yeah--I brought up the 'Jeremiah' series in an old thread somewhere. I find it okay but the quality of the show has suffered quite a bit since the early episodes--I honestly still have trouble wrapping my mind around why there would be fights over resources given the massive die-off depicted in the show.

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Thanks for the Reply, I know there are more movies with the same Vampire theme, and the end of the world. I was wrong about the year, 1964 and Omega Man, Thanks for the info.

Yeah, i reckon the most likely scenario for a contemporary killer epidemic would be due to the results of Soviet biowarfare experimentation, such as the possible scenarios described above, or possibly also the 1979 smallpox outbreak in Semipalatinsk IIRC, which could've become such a worldwide killer if it'd got out of hand.

Anybody read BIOWAR by Ken Alibek ? he was a Soviet high-ranking officer (of Kazakh ethnicity- his full name being Kanjaitan Alibekhov) involved in biological warfare development thruout the 1980s and early 1990s until he defected to the US.