How to see the cruelty of Mother Nature from the "dead woodchuck sashimi" in Mongolia?

From April to May this year, a plague broke out in our neighbor Mongolia, and a large number of foreigners were infected, two of whom died. Although this is an unfortunate event on the whole, if you know the cause and effect, you will definitely feel sorry-you won't die if you don't die!

The two people who died were tourists from Russia. Their real names have been erased for privacy protection. At present, we only know that the male tourist code "Citizen T" (meaning Citizen T) is T)38 years old and the female tourist is his wife, 37 years old and pregnant. Not only that, they have four children, aged 2-12. At that time, it was Labor Day, and they came to Bayan-Ulgii, the westernmost province of Mongolia, for a holiday.

So it is really a sad story. A happy family is separated by Yin and Yang on a happy journey, leaving four children who are not familiar with the world. But do you know how they got the plague? Most people can't imagine it. We all know that Russians are fierce. At best, they are called fighting nations, at worst, they are called iron handyman. They often do things that normal humans can't imagine, such as raising bears and throwing their children into the lake in winter, but these things are nothing compared with what these two tourists did.

This young man caught a local woodchuck, and then ... he ate the meat and internal organs of the woodchuck raw! His wife also ate meat, but didn't eat internal organs.

On the same day, this Russian died of a sudden illness, and so did his wife ...

You see, this level of death is really unusual. No wonder the population of Russia has been declining. They really like to die.

What is the plague?

Now we may not be very familiar with the plague. After all, there has been no epidemic of plague for decades, but the reputation of this disease is well-known in human history, because people who die of plague usually have a high fever, vomit blood and turn black and purple, so it is named "Black Death".

Europe suffered the most from this vicious infectious disease, only in 1348. If you count the non-concentrated epidemic in the next 3 years, about half of Europeans will die of this disease. If you look at the world, about 3 million people will die of this disease. In 1348, Lubeck, a German chronicler, recorded that 9, people died, and at the worst, more than 1,5 people died in a single day!

Although the world war was tragic, it only consumed 5% of the total population in Europe. It is precisely because of the tragedy of the plague that Europeans rushed to the hospital and started the era of "no bathing to keep safe". The terrible image "bird's beak mask" appeared in many film and television works was also an invention to deal with the Black Death at that time. Objectively speaking, it was also useful to prevent infection.

Defeat the plague

Then why is such a disease that can be ignored most of the time now?

Because the unknown is the most terrible thing, people didn't know how to deal with infectious diseases before. People in the Middle Ages once thought that plague was a curse, a kind of death who descended from the sky to the earth and reaped life invisibly. The church also claimed that it was God's punishment for the world. It's like entering a dark room while playing a game. No matter what you do, you will definitely die in one minute, and you don't know what happened, and there is no way to deal with it.

is there really no way to deal with it? This is not the case. After paying an extremely painful price, mankind finally understood the law of the spread of the disease through science. Although there is no way to treat the plague for a long time, it can be stopped by reducing the flow of people and actively isolating it. Most of the epidemics tend to slow down after the population density has decreased sharply.

In the mid-19th century, an Austrian obstetrician Ignaz? Semmelweiss (1818-1865) discovered that there was a clear relationship between contact and disease, and invented the method of hand washing and disinfection. For the first time, human beings realized that there were some small, invisible, but indeed erasable things that determined whether they were sick or not.

the Dutch Antony van Leeuwemhoek (1632-1723) first observed bacteria with a self-made microscope, but at that time people thought that bacteria were spontaneously produced in organic matter.

Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) proved that bacteria came from the air and did not occur naturally in food.

Koch (Robert Koch ,1843-191) took certain steps to prove that a disease was caused by a specific bacterium.

The real victory came when penicillin was invented in 1928. Alexander Fleming 1881—1955) discovered the chemical weapon of mutual attack between microorganisms. The substance extracted from mold can directly destroy the metabolism and even the cell structure of bacteria and kill them.

At this point, mankind's ten thousand-year struggle against plague has achieved a staged victory. As long as scientific and effective methods are adopted, even the most terrible diseases can be effectively controlled in modern human society, except those who commit their own deaths.