Al-Qaida and the Black Death

St. Louis Post Dispatch: Even by the flamboyant headline standards of England’s The Sun newspaper (“Worst mum in the world!”), this one was a real attention-grabber: “Deadliest weapon so far ... the plague.”

Black Death — the plague — swept through a terrorist training camp in Algeria, killing at least 40 members of an al-Qaida-linked terrorist group, the newspaper reported last week.

The London tabloid said the deaths came to light when Algerian police found a body on the side of the road. They followed leads that took them to the now-abandoned training camp, where more bodies were discovered.

The victims — if that’s the right word to describe those infected while training to kill civilians — supposedly were associated with a group called al-Qaida in the Land of the Islamic Maghreb. Algeria is in North Africa, but the British newspaper says fleeing terrorists may have spread the disease to other camps in the Middle East.

‘Deadliest weapon’

“This is the deadliest weapon yet in the war against terror,” the tabloid quotes an unnamed “security source” as saying.

Terrorists dying of Black Death? A story like that, as they say in the tabloid trade, is almost too good to check out. But when a version was posted on ProMed Digest, a listserv on infectious disease outbreaks, it prompted a skeptical response from an Algerian doctor.

The disease, caused by a bacterium called Yersinia pestis, can be treated with strong antibiotics. But its deadly reputation was cemented in the 14th century when the Black Death swept across Europe, killing as much as a third of the population.

That brings a kind of karmic symmetry to this odd little tale. After all, al-Qaida is best known for trying to recreate the Middle Ages.