COTW: Blast From the Past

Latest:  A fifteen year old boy died of bubonic plague in Mongolia, officials said Tuesday.  He lived in remote Gobi-Altai province and contracted the disease after hunting and eating a marmot, a species of rodent.  Five provinces were placed under a six day quarantine and the first 15 people the boy came in contact with were treated with antibiotics.  Earlier this month two other cases of plague were found in Khovd province, but no apparent spread of the disease was detected after 140 people were tested.  A man in the Chinese region of Inner Mongolia also died of the disease this month [below]. Russia has taken the precaution of testing rodents in Burytia, eastern Siberia, for plague.  Despite warnings to avoid contact with marmots, about one person per year dies of plague in Mongolia.  Consuming marmot organs are thought to bring beneficial health effects.  NOT!

{08.07.20} People ask US Person, will it be back to normal after the pandemic?  US usuallyresponds by asking, what do you mean by 'normal'.  Certainly altered social behavior, including economic behavior, will be with us until an effective vaccine is developed which will take at least until next year.  Fortunately SARS CoV-2 is not as lethal as Ebola virus or even Yersinia pestis, which kills between 30-60% of its victims if left untreated by antibiotics. [photo below]  This bacteria causes the dreaded black death, or bubonic plague, the most common form of the disease.  Covid-19 may be with us for some time to come, as there are predictions that it could become seasonally persistent like the flu.  Science has more to learn about the novel virus and its long term effects on humans.  The virus is mutating, too, presumably to become more adapted to its human hosts.

Yes, the plague is still with us after all these years,  existing in the southwest United States to date. The last plague epidemic occurred in China and India in the 19th century, killing about 12 million people.  A recent case of a man in Inner Mongolia contracting the disease, probably from marmots consumed as food, has made the news. The WHO says the case is isolated and being well managed, but still, bubonic plague in the 21st century? Who would have figured?  Look--this chart below shows that a few people still die of bubonic plague in the United States:

The states of California, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona form the "plague line" in the US.  The disease persists in these states because of an animal reservoir in which the bacteria can survive. Highly social prairie dogs are  preferred hosts, but the pathogen is also carried by other species, such as black-footed ferrets [photo below]. Canadian lynx are also known carriers.  Usually the bacteria is transferred to humans by infected flea bites.

The existence of this animal reservoir in Nature makes the disease almost impossible to eradicate. The only human disease eradicated by science, smallpox, does not exist in animals.  Polio has almost been exterminated, but still hangs on in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and has returned to Syria since the ravages of its civil war. There are efforts to immunize possible animal carriers in areas where interaction with humans could be prevalent, such as parks. An oral vaccine has been developed to treat prairie dogs and ferrets. Prairie dogs seem to prefer peanut butter balls as bait, research shows.

Research on plague is "vibrant" with scientists researching ways to better detect the disease, and find a human vaccine to prevent it. Effective anti-bacterial drugs exist to treat bubonic plague, which is curable if caught in time. The reason for the scientific interest in a plague from the past is that it is classified as a category A biological weapon.

US COVID-19 deaths (est.): 187,675.*


*Yale University estimates that the actual death toll in the US is 28% higher than official reporting. This figure was reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) on Wednesday.  The most accurate way to count the number of dead from the pandemic is to calculate the number of "excess deaths" over a similar period of time, pre-pandemic.  A team led by a Yale epidemiologist, Daniel Weinberger, counted the number of deaths in the US between March and May using state death records compared to a base line of recorded deaths from January 2015 to and January 2020.  This calculation provided expected deaths to which the actual figures were compared.  Forty-one states and DC all had a higher number of deaths than expected. Weinberger and his colleagues wrote, “Monitoring excess mortality provides a key tool in evaluating the effects of an ongoing pandemic.”