Don’t forget though, the American muslims will be bringing it back with them.
So what about all the US service members who are now coming back home from the ME in big numbers after the drawdown of troops in that region? Do you think the possibility of bringing and commuting this virus back to the US is limited only to Muslims?
And what about the American business people, those who are contractors for American oil companies and other Americans, many of them non-Muslims who travel internationally for business? And FWIW, they don’t even have to travel directly to and from the ME but could be in some major European or Asian airport hub waiting for a connecting flight and come in contact with another traveler who was in the ME or someone who came in contact with someone who came in contact with someone who came in contact with someone who had just been to Mecca, Medina, and Saudi Arabia's holy sites.
FWIW, the company I work for manufactures conveyor belting and power transmission components used in both the mining and oil industries among other many other industries word wide. And we have sales people who travel not only domestically but all over the world including to the ME selling our US manufactured goods. Do you think just because they are not Muslims that that makes them immune from contracting a virus and passing it on to others?
Just the place for a virulent bacteria...sterilize it.
This is a virus and not a bacteria and unlike a bacterial disease like Typhoid or Cholera which is contracted and spread by contaminated food and water and human feces and kept under control for the most part by our modern sanitation in the US, a virulent virus like the 1918-19 pandemic flu is much more easily contracted by casual contact – someone nearby sneezing or coughing and like the Spanish flu, this could be spread by troop movements in addition to normal international travel.
And while the article is correct that the Black Death killed many in the Middle East during the Middle Ages, the actual disease called bubonic plague originated not in the ME but in China or Central Asia and it is not a virus at all - bubonic plague is not an airborne contagion or spread directly person to person – rather bubonic plague or “yersinia pestis” is a bacterial disease spread by infected rat fleas much like malaria is spread person to person by mosquitoes. In other words if you come in contact with someone with bubonic plague you will not catch it directly from them but you will catch if an infected flea bites you or bites an infected person and then bites you. While that vector of transmission is nothing to “sneeze about” (pun intended) the spread is not that fast and contraction not as likely as with a virulent viral airborne disease like we saw with the 1918-19 “Spanish Flu” that killed an estimated 100 million people worldwide over a short span of 2 years and much of the rapid and world wide spread of the flu virus is attributable to troop movements during WWI.
Some scientists and epidemiologists today think that while yersinia pestis was responsible for some waves of “plague” during the Middle Ages, some outbreaks might not have been bubonic plague at all but a viral disease similar to Ebola given the speed of which it spread and reports of how contagious it seemed to be given the written accounts of the time and some of the symptoms that are not at all consistent with what we know about bubonic plague as it is still a disease that pops up now and then.
A virus in the ME that so far kills mostly Moslems and could potentially kill many more Moslems traveling on a pilgrimage to Mecca might sound like a win-win to some here, but a potentially airborne flu virus simply doesn’t care about or ask you about your religious or political affiliation and doesn’t respect boarders or nations. It doesn’t take but only a few people to vector a deadly novel airborne human to human flu strain from one country to the next and next..