How the scourge that slaughtered entire continents is now a minor worry:
A second Yosemite National Park campground will be shut down for five days after a pair of dead squirrels were found to be infected with the plague, park and California public health officials said on Friday.
The closure of Tuolumne Meadows Campground comes a week after a child who camped elsewhere in Yosemite, one of America’s top tourist destinations, was taken to hospital with the disease.
The case marked the first time a human was known to be infected with the centuries-old scourge, which is carried by rodents and the fleas that live on them, in California since 2006.
Different explanations abound: we’re all in general healthier. There’s fewer rodents around us in cities. There’s damn few fleas around. Or people and their genes likely to get plague are dead and out of the population.
Dunno myself, any other ideas?
Antibiotics.
Thank you again, Drs. Florey, Chain and Fleming.
Or it could be that The Plague wasn’t really the plague. There are theories it was some other pathogen that wiped nearly everyone out.
http://annaraccoon.com/2012/12/09/danse-macabre-the-black-death-part-i/
http://annaraccoon.com/2012/12/16/danse-macabre-the-black-death-part-2/
I thought the rat population was booming.
Well, the most ill I have ever been was a couple of days after having the bubonic plague vaccine. Lasted for 3 or 4 days.
Courtesy of Porton Down at the insistence of a Mr S Hussein, that particular bit of misery.
SBML – that’s a very interesting read.
Isn’t septicaemic plague that seriously dangerous variant?
That = the
Doc Bud: “I thought the rat population was booming.”
Bring them within the Welfare state.
That’ll fix ’em.
That or the Pied Sniper of Hamelin.
SBML: very interesting post: always wondered why a bacteriological agent would cause such rapid (virus-like) infection and progression of symptoms. Turns out it wouldn’t. Also, an interesting example of overreliance upon a small evidence base.
Edward Lud: I think it’s pneumonic that’s the really scary one. Although that’s more because it’s airborne, whereas things like really deadly virii such as haemorrhagic fevers and bacteriological diseases aren’t usually
I thought the real problem was some bird with flu.
I blame America and neo-liberalism for the Black Dearth.
It’s the booze, or the fags, or the sugar, or the fat, or the exercise – anyway, it’s something in the diet or lifestyle that either makes us more or less vulnerable to it. There: that’s most medical opinion covered.
Plague is endemic in the American west, I remembered reading about that years ago and googled just now and found
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00001757.htm