A completely new threat seems to be emerging from China to harm human health in the form of a pandemic even as the world is fighting hard to overcome the coronavirus. Reappearing in the form of bubonic plague – or Black Death as it was called earlier– that had killed millions of people in the 14th Century, the virus’ origin this time is in the northern part of China in the Mongolia region. An alert has gone out against birds that could carry the virus.
News sources say only a couple of infections have been reported, but truth might be different. China set off the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic similar to Covid-19 in Year 2002, and it killed around 800 people worldwide and then regressed somehow. A repeat of virus threats from China goes to show something is seriously wrong with the way of life and governance in this dictator ruled country. If China continues the way it is going, it can pose a great threat to the rest of the world and humanity as a whole. In this context, a Tweet by US President Donald Trump saying – ‘China has caused great damage to the United States and the rest of the World!’- rings true.
Bubonic plague had surfaced in small ways in recent years as also the previous century, and claimed lives in the African continent. It did not spread on a massive scale. This time, since it has originated in China, the world needs to be doubly alert. The Chinese are probably doing two things. One, they are consuming various kinds of animals, insects and birds that may be passing on peculiar diseases of those species on to human beings. On mutating, these infections are proving deadly to mankind. Second, it is also possible that China is researching into very many types of diseases for its military usage. In a new world conflict situation, conventional military tactics could be replaced by biological warfare.
Shi Zhengli, a Chinese expert in SARS-like coronaviruses of bat origins at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and well known as ‘bat-woman’, has said that coronavirus is just the tip of the iceberg. She also added that Covid-19 was very similar to a coronavirus sample named RaTG13 obtained in Yunnan in 2013. Also, interestingly, between Covid-19 and this recent spotting of Bubonic plague, the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports a bad new strain of influenza among the top disease threats that experts are watching for, even as the world attempts to cope with the current coronavirus pandemic. This new virus has been named A/H1N1 pdm09. This is similar to the Swine Flu that spread globally in 2009. Such reasons make China a huge threat to global peace and stability.
Also, people’s movement from China to the outside world is on a large scale due to the massive trade and business interests it has spawned over the recent years. What started as China Town in the United States is a common sight across continents now, in the form of Dragon Mart etc, employing hundreds of thousands of Chinese who frequent into and out of China at regular intervals. This is also the reason why Covid-19 spread fast into several continents and turned life upside down everywhere. Chinese ingenuity is such that they explored business opportunities linked to Covid-19 too in the form of massive supply of equipment to face the epidemic, and make big money.
World Health Organisation (WHO) that is tasked with monitoring health-related scenarios worldwide failed to fathom the grave implications of Covid-19 spread at the very start, sometime around December 2019. By then, with no restrictions in place on international travel as should have been the case, the virus went places and set itself on a destruction course. While US president Donald Trump might have erred in more ways than one in the initial stages of the virus spread in the US, part of the blame for this was also the casual manner in which WHO approached the matter.
In a steadily worsening scenario, India has reached the third position in the world in terms of the number of infections so far – rising at a rate of 25,000 infections a day, as latest records showed. Brazil and the US remain the two other worst-hit nations, while Russia is also fighting the virus in a massive manner. The world as a whole will take a decade’s time to get back to where it lost the way forward at the start of this year.
Curiously, with China unleashing plague after plague, its leadership is showing no remorse and is rather busy fishing for trouble almost everywhere. As latest reports show, it is raising the heat in Bhutan again in an attempt to usurp territory, which is bound to open another front for India to tackle in view of the treaty that Bhutan and India have signed in relation to regional security. The US has sent a strong message to China by demonstrating its might in the South China Sea at this juncture. Word was spread in India on Monday that China is pulling its troops out of Galwan Valley. However, such reports have no way to be verified and satellite images being put up cannot easily be understood by untrained people.