Can anyone help me with a project on epidemics and viruses?

3258>I was assigned a project for Biology after reading "The Hot Zone", and it consists of the following things:





1. Describe all the human contacts you have during a typical school day, starting from the time you get up in the morning. In case of a dangerous exposure, how would you begin the process of contacting those you were in contact with and quarentining them?





2. Prepare a graph of the deaths by the black plague. What was the vector(mode of transmission)? (note: I can't find this information anywhere)





3. Imagine a virus with the infectiousness of the flu and the mortality rate of the black plague. What could we do to protect ourselves against this?





4. Recall the cleanup at the Reston monkey facility. A) make a timeline of events. B) write four recommendations to CJ about things that worked and things that didn't (note: you had to read "The Hot Zone" to understand this question)





If anyone could help me with any of these questions, that would help a lot. Thanks!
Reply:I can't really help you much with the first one, since I don't know what you did today. Just think about the people you talked to. If you gave money to the guy at the coffee cart, you could have exposed him. If you took a school bus, then all the kids on that bus would have to be notified. But if took a public bus, there's no way to know who was and wasn't on that.





Second question, a google search of black plague vectors would have told you that it was spread by fleas, carried around on rats. The rats were the carriers of the disease, and the fleas spread it from the rats to humans. So you had to get bite by a flea to get it.





For the third question, think about what kinds of the things we do now to protect ourselves from the flu. Lots of hand washing and staying away from sick people. Maybe we would need to quarantine people, or not allow flights from areas with sick folks and areas without. Hospitals and public health departments would be overrun, there would need to be temporary shelters and probably temporary morgues. How would this be done? And it would cost a lot of money, where would that come from.





Not much can be done on the fourth one expect for read the book!