In one of many priceless scenes in the film "The Mad World of Monty Python", a hearse full of dead plague victims creaks along one of the smelly alleys of the Middle Ages. John Cleese tries to transfer another victim of the dreaded disease onto the cart for payment, but is met with wild protests - from the "corpse": "I'm not dead yet!" The problem is solved with a well-aimed club blow.
Well, the plague is one of the most mythical diseases in cultural history - from the god Apollo's death-bringing arrows over the Greek camps in "The Iliad" to the boils in Ingmar Bergman's "The Seventh Seal" and the zombie plague in the TV series "Last of us".
And for good reasons. The plague bacterium, yersinia pestis, has through the centuries wreaked havoc with the living conditions of entire generations of people – a kind of microbial weapon of mass destruction.
No wonder then that the last week's events in the city of Shelekhov in Russian Siberia evoke such strong emotions. What has happened is that a laboratory employee at a plague research institute has died of a "particularly serious form of pneumonia", hundreds of people have been quarantined and at least five hospitals in the region have been closed. Unconfirmed information suggests that the dead woman may have accidentally broken a test tube with pneumonic plague bacteria. According to other - likewise unconfirmed - information, these must have belonged to an antibiotic-resistant variant, developed for military purposes.
In that case, the latter would match with uncanny precision the scenario that the well-known American journalist and author Annie Jacobsen presents in her brand new book "Biological war - a scenario", which was published earlier this fall.
Jacobsen - who previously wrote an acclaimed book about the consequences of a nuclear war - here describes a disaster that begins with an accident at a particular laboratory in Siberia, where a scientist is exposed to a biological weapon. Before anyone understands what has happened, the disease spreads with people out into the world and accelerates into a global crisis. Healthcare and social functions collapse, chaos, anarchy and panic take over.
No one knows today how close the similarities between speculative fiction and reality will be, nor is that the point. The point is instead that fully or semi-military laboratories such as Annie Jacobsen describes exist and that the research into life-threatening microorganisms that is conducted there are potential threats to our civilization - not least when they originate from closed rogue states such as Russia and China. The interesting thing is not if or when reality will follow Jacobsen's scenario, but that the suspected plague outbreak in Siberia shows why her scenario is conceivable.
Can our poor generation, already severely tested by AI threats and approaching climate disaster, have another stone added to their heavy burden? Possibly not. But unlike these threats, our civilization has faced and fought infectious diseases in the past. Not least the plague bacterium has had a pervasive role in everything from Europe's demography and economic development during the Renaissance to how we organized modern society's infection control and healthcare.
It is often the smallest organisms that cause the biggest convulsions in human history.
