Stardate 20011004.1150 (On Screen): The fourth horseman of the Apocalypse, Plague, has shown up in Afghanistan to help make Afghani refugees lives even more miserable. (Death, War and Famine have been there for years.) There has been an outbreak of Crimean-Congo Haemorrhagic Fever at the border of Pakistan. Haemorrhagic fevers are among the most deadly viral infections known; other members of that group include Marburg and Ebola. CCH is not quite as deadly as those; it "only" kills one third of those it infects on average (as opposed to 70% for Marburg and upwards of 95% for Ebola) but it is horrible nonetheless. There are forms of haemorrhagic fevers all over the world; there was one which afflicted troops during the Korean war, for instance, and there's one which pops up every once in a while in the American southwest. CCH is apparently endemic to Afghanistan, but like all diseases it will spread much faster in the conditions present in refugee camps, where people are cold, badly fed, concentrated together and have terrible sanitation. And in those kinds of conditions the death rate will probably be higher than normal. As a result, there may be tens of thousands of deaths from this disease at make-shift refugee camps in Afghanistan right next to the Pakistani border, since Pakistan will now have to really clamp down and stop letting refugees into their nation.
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