Saturday, September 5, 2015

60,000 Antelope Dead - Should We be Worried About This?

Normally we don't concern ourselves all to much with what is happening around the world unless it directly involves the USA in some way, shape or form. Even then, way too many of us are unconcerned about things like what is going on with our troops in Afghanistan, whether or not the North Koreans are capable of nuking us, why Obama has dragged us into a brand new Cold War with Russia and China, and on and on and on.

We should be concerned about all that stuff but probably are not concerned enough. We leave it to our so called leaders to handle it. Now there seems to be another thing that we should be concerned about but which I am willing to bet most of us have zero knowledge. It is the recent die-off of a herd of 60,000 (yes sixty thousand) saiga antelope in Kazakhstan within about a few days time frame. An entire herd of saiga just dropped dead. More here.

You may wonder, what in Hades does the sudden demise of a herd of antelope in Asia have to do with us and I would proffer that it may have a lot to do with us or nothing. What it has to do with us is the potential for the cause of the die off to spread, to become epidemic throughout different species and then to become pandemic around the globe. That may be a far fetched idea but then so too would the idea of 60K antelope being killed off by bacteria within only 4 days.

Yes, scientists are blaming bacteria but they are befuddled as to how and why it happened. The type of bacteria is considered normal fauna in the guts of saiga. So why would the bacteria suddenly cause 60K fatalities. I don't know about you, but I wonder if government meddling, military madness, and maniacal scientists fueled bio-warfare was somehow involved. The last time an event this big happened among a saiga herd, it dwarfed this one. That was back when Kazakhstan was still part of the USSR (look it up kids, make some intelligent use of the Internet). Back then, 400,000 saiga were wiped out and no one knows the exact reason with any certainty. It was blamed on "...Pasteurellosis, the disease caused by Pasteurella..." (source) bacteria but that happened under Soviet rule and reportedly little to no investigation was done. Does that smell of cover-up, I will let the conspiracy theorists figure it out.

This time round though, scientists were there concurrently studying the saiga herd. So they have collected lots of evidence but are still clueless as to how this normally quasi-benign bacteria killed of so many animals with such ferocity over just 4 short days. As for me, I am just hoping it is not a harbinger of things to come in the form of germ warfare research gone berserk along the lines of The Stand by Stephen King. Or it could be worse, it could be bio-weapons testing as a prelude to bio-warfare.

All the best,
GB

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