How Silent Fall the Cherry Blossoms
- Thread starter Geon
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How can you not think it's bubonic plague? Look at the symptoms again:
That's the defining symptom of bubonic plague, the one the whole disease is named after! The moment I read that yesterday, I went, "Yep, that's bubonic plague".
Other symptoms include high fever, muscle cramps, and vomiting (of blood, though it's possible more ordinary vomiting is also a symptom).
Not to mention what the doctor thinks about it:
As we were discussing earlier, bubonic plague is endemic to the Los Angeles area. Bush/Scrub typhus is very much not, although tularemia probably is (it is named after a county only a little farther north in California, after all).
So, the evidence is pointing towards bubonic plague as being the deployed agent, with a weak possibility of tularemia.
Pangur
Donor
OK, well that is not on the face of it as bad as it could be. St least doctors will know what it is and know how to deal with the situation. That is assuming that it is not some strain that has been modified so that there is no known treatment. I am curious as to how key was LA to supporting the marines and navy deployed in the pacific?
Artatochor
Banned
Swollen lymph glands appear in other diseases too. I had a severe throat infection as a child, and everyone who saw me commented on my potato-like lymph nodes.
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Who says the doctor has made a correct diagnosis?
If he knows that bubonic plague is endemic to the area, and he sees a set of symptoms that fits, he's likely to make the assumption that it is bubonic plague.
As others have mentioned, swollen lymph nodes are a common symptom of a lot of infectious diseases. Buboes are not, but in the early stages it's not really possible to tell the difference.
Artatochor
Banned
As scary as it sounds, I believe that Americans would be willing to try this. I think though, that the Soviets would try to stop that, to gain morality points as the Cold War comes.
Well, the fact that this is being written after the events depicted. The fact that the deployment method (porcelain bombs packed with disease-carrying fleas) is identical to the method used by the Japanese to spread the disease in China. The fact that Unit 731 worked extensively on bubonic plague, and much less on other flea-borne diseases. There's a lot of circumstantial evidence at this point, not just the diagnosis of a doctor, pointing towards plague. Honestly, I don't understand why a lot of people here, for some reason, want it not to be bubonic plague, and are coming up with some pretty strange and rare diseases it could be while dismissing the most likely and obvious possibility.
It could easily be plague, but as I mentioned, Unit 731 definitely worked on other organisms that could be delivered in an identical fashion. Admittedly Scrub Typhus is amongst the least likely (it's the only one I've mentioned that there isn't definite evidence of it being studied by one of the Japanese bioweapons research units), but it would be an organism that they would definitely be familiar with, since the initial identification and other work took place in Japan.
Whatever disease or diseases have been released makes little difference really, all are potentially fatal, and there's very little that can be done for any of the patients other than supportive measures to try to keep them alive while they fight the infection themselves.
Is it necessarily one sort of disease? After all, everyone knows that the worst/best time to be hit by a disease is at the same time you've been hit by another. Unit 731 got up to all kinds of mischief, I wouldn't be surprised if they decided to chuck everything they had at the Americans.
Geon
Donor
The Horsemen
Here is an update for the weekend. This one I will admit allows me to be a bit dramatic but I felt this was the place for it.
Enjoy!
Geon
Date: November 7, 1944
Location: Los Angeles (various Hospitals)
Time: Evening
Over the course of six hours in the afternoon five patients were admitted to hospitals in the Los Angeles area with similar symptoms. The symptoms were noted by the doctors and also by members of the LACG who had been sent to the various hospitals to monitor this.
Members of the team noted the similarities in symptoms and when the parents were interviewed it would be discovered that all the patients lived near the impact sites of the bombs or had foolishly taken souvenirs home with them. The incidents would be reported at the next meeting of the crisis group tomorrow morning. While the evidence was still not conclusive it was already becoming very likely that Japan had done the unthinkable.
During the night another 18 people would be admitted with the same symptoms, nausea, vomiting, high fever, and muscle cramps. In addition the telltale red marks were starting to appear on the first five patients admitted, on their necks or underarms or groin.
By morning there could be no doubt that an ancient killer was loose again in the land. In one hospital a shaken member of the LACG went to a chapel and knelt in prayer saying
"O Star of Heaven, beloved of the Lord, drive away the foul constellation that has slain the people with the wound of dreadful death. O Star of the Sea, save us from the poison-breath that kills, from the enemy that slays in the night. AMEN."*
It had ravaged medieval Europe and had from time to time arisen to remind humanity of its mortality. Now because of the machinations of war it was unleashed again. The second horseman of the apocalypse rode with the fourth and the fourth’s name this time was plague.
* Prayer by Lady Francesca Wilde
Here is an update for the weekend. This one I will admit allows me to be a bit dramatic but I felt this was the place for it.
Enjoy!
Geon
Date: November 7, 1944
Location: Los Angeles (various Hospitals)
Time: Evening
Over the course of six hours in the afternoon five patients were admitted to hospitals in the Los Angeles area with similar symptoms. The symptoms were noted by the doctors and also by members of the LACG who had been sent to the various hospitals to monitor this.
Members of the team noted the similarities in symptoms and when the parents were interviewed it would be discovered that all the patients lived near the impact sites of the bombs or had foolishly taken souvenirs home with them. The incidents would be reported at the next meeting of the crisis group tomorrow morning. While the evidence was still not conclusive it was already becoming very likely that Japan had done the unthinkable.
During the night another 18 people would be admitted with the same symptoms, nausea, vomiting, high fever, and muscle cramps. In addition the telltale red marks were starting to appear on the first five patients admitted, on their necks or underarms or groin.
By morning there could be no doubt that an ancient killer was loose again in the land. In one hospital a shaken member of the LACG went to a chapel and knelt in prayer saying
"O Star of Heaven, beloved of the Lord, drive away the foul constellation that has slain the people with the wound of dreadful death. O Star of the Sea, save us from the poison-breath that kills, from the enemy that slays in the night. AMEN."*
It had ravaged medieval Europe and had from time to time arisen to remind humanity of its mortality. Now because of the machinations of war it was unleashed again. The second horseman of the apocalypse rode with the fourth and the fourth’s name this time was plague.
* Prayer by Lady Francesca Wilde
Not if the Soviets invade Japan first. Or if Japan surrenders to them first, to make the Americans stop bombing Japan with nukes, germs, and gas.
sharlin
Banned
Black Death it is then but correct me if i'm wrong isn't it fairly curable by the standards of the day? The main problem of course being getting meds to the affected areas and stopping people from moving around etc. It will kill a LOT of people but with luck it will burn itself out.
Geon
Donor
The symptoms are treatable but as another member of the board reminded me in an earlier post pennicilin doesn't affect it. Also from what I read bubonic plague which is transmissible by insect bite can often develop into pneumonic plague which has air borne transmission.
Also, note the fact that human nature being what it is you had people bringing home souvenirs of the bombs to show to their friends and family. Luck right now is not entirely with the good citizens of LA.
The death toll will be considerable and there will be repercussions for Japan.
I will also drop this one little enigmatic spoiler
. Before this story TL is over a villain will become a hero.Geon
Containable? Yes. People in the US arent normally bitten by rat fleas, and the fact that Plague is endemic in rodents, but is not much of a problem with people in the SW US is an indication of this.
Treatable? No. The treatment is often streptomycin, which was only discovered the year before. Remember, even penicillin is brand new and has only just reached industrial scale production.
Im a bit surprised at the human-human transmission. Until you get the pneumonic for, which i dont think we've seen yet, you have to transmit it through fleas, ....
The symptoms are treatable but as another member of the board reminded me in an earlier post pennicilin doesn't affect it. Also from what I read bubonic plague which is transmissible by insect bite can often develop into pneumonic plague which has air borne transmission.
Also, note the fact that human nature being what it is you had people bringing home souvenirs of the bombs to show to their friends and family. Luck right now is not entirely with the good citizens of LA.
The death toll will be considerable and there will be repercussions for Japan.
I will also drop this one little enigmatic spoiler
Geon
IIRC, first line treatment for bubonic plague is streptomycin. I think it might have been discovered (or be about to be discovered), but the first clinical trials of it's use as a treatment for TB aren't 'till 1947. Even if somebody did think it might help, at the moment it's still very much something that exists in a lab, not something that can be mass produced in a form that can be administered to patients (Florey and Chain didn't win a Nobel prize for discovering penicillin, they won it for turning an interesting discovery in a lab into a real medicine that could be mass produced and given to people who needed it).
IIRC, although bubonic plague can develop into the pneumonic form, that's a relatively rare occurrence (maybe 1% of infections). Having said that, even 1% gives scope for a second wave of infections with pneumonic plague. Now, if the Japanese had managed to develop a method of weaponising the plague bacillus in a form that was infective if inhaled, and delivered it appropriately (sprayed from an aircraft, or bombs air bursting at relatively low altitude), then you'd have the potential for something really, really nasty.
Where this will really hurt is in the slums and ghettoes, there there is a lot of rat-human interaction, and the relations between the people and the authorities is .... not friendly.
Cant you just see white policemen going into black ghettoes rousting all the locals out, probably preventing them from bringing ANYTHING out, and then bulldozing and/or burning the whole neighbourhood.
Meanwhile the poor are being forcibly deloused in industrial facilities and housed, probably in tent cities with no way to earn a living.
Social consequences for the post war era could be huge. Now that i think about it.
Heck, the provided housing may even be sex segragated, so families get split up.
Ouch.
Cant you just see white policemen going into black ghettoes rousting all the locals out, probably preventing them from bringing ANYTHING out, and then bulldozing and/or burning the whole neighbourhood.
Meanwhile the poor are being forcibly deloused in industrial facilities and housed, probably in tent cities with no way to earn a living.
Social consequences for the post war era could be huge. Now that i think about it.
Heck, the provided housing may even be sex segragated, so families get split up.
Ouch.
I see large numbers of troops having to be recalled from overseas to suppress enormous race riots...
At most they'd bring out stateside forces waiting to be shipped overseas. IIRC there are two infantry divisions waiting to be shipped out to the Pacific when the Battle of the Bulge started, so those would be available if it does come to that.
Marc A
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