Bubonic / Pneumonic / Septicemic Plague: Yersinia Pestis

A fatal case of bubonic plague has occurred in Inner Mongolia - the second this year.
China seals off village after bubonic plague death in Inner Mongolia

Authorities in the Chinese region of Inner Mongolia have sealed off a village after a resident there died from bubonic plague, a centuries-old disease responsible for the most deadly pandemic in human history.

The death was reported to health authorities in Baotou city on Sunday and the victim was confirmed to be a bubonic plague patient on Thursday, the Baotou Municipal Health Commission said in a statement on its website.

The patient died of circulatory system failure, according to the statement. It did not mention how the patient had caught the plague.

To curb the spread of the disease, authorities sealed off Suji Xincun village, where the dead patient lived, and ordered daily disinfection of homes. All villagers have so far tested negative for the disease, the statement said.

Nine close contacts and 26 secondary contacts of the patient have been quarantined and tested negative, the commission said.

Damao Banner, the district where the village is located, has been put on Level 3 alert for plague prevention, the second lowest in a four-level system, until the end of the year.

This is the second case -- and first death -- of bubonic plague China has confirmed this year. ...
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FULL STORY: https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/07/asia/china-mongolia-bubonic-plague-death-intl-hnk-scli-scn/index.html
 
A case has surfaced in California - the first since 2015.
A California resident has been diagnosed with plague for the first time in five years

A South Lake Tahoe resident has been diagnosed with the plague, marking the first human case in California since 2015.

Health officials believe the person may have been bitten by an infected flea while walking their dog in the area, according to a press release from the El Dorado County Health and Human Services Agency.

The infected person is recovering at home under the care of a medical professional, the release said.

Symptoms of plague often appear within two weeks of exposure and can include fever, nausea, weakness and swollen lymph nodes, according to the release. Treatment with antibiotics can be effective if the infectious disease is detected early enough. ...

The last confirmed case of plague in California was in 2015, when two people were exposed to infected rodents or their fleas in Yosemite National Park. Both people were treated and recovered.

Before that, there hadn't been a case in the state since 2006.

In recent decades, an average of seven cases of human plague have been reported each year in the United States, with a range of one to 17 cases per year, the CDC reports.

Earlier this month, a New Mexico man in his 20's died from septicemic plague. He was the state's second confirmed case this year. ...
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FULL STORY: https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/18/us/california-plague-first-since-2015-trnd/index.html
 
Yersinia pestis made its way into the western states of the US as part of the third pandemic at the end of the 19th century. It got into the rodent population and has been quietly lurking there ever since.
 
I don't think cooked marmoset would be any more appealing...
 
Lb8535 said:
...It's not super-easy to get but you do have to take care for example in cleaning out mouse nests - gloves and masks. It lives for 10 days outside of the rodent, so disgusting old nests are safer. And fleas. Avoid them.
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Avoid them like the plague...
 
hunck said:
Just a gentle reminder that it's not marmosets [monkeys] but marmots [rodents] which puts an entirely different complexion on it.
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I don't think I've ever seen a marmot.

I know what marmosets look like but just can't think what a marmot looks like.

Will have to Google it.
 
WeeScottishLassie said:
I don't think I've ever seen a marmot.

I know what marmosets look like but just can't think what a marmot looks like.

Will have to Google it.
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Here's one doing a Highland Fling!

marmot.jpg
 
Newly published research indicates the plague arrived in Siberia no later than 4,400 years ago and possibly caused a population collapse that affected migrations to North America.
Plague may have caused die-offs of ancient Siberians

Ancient people brought the plague to Siberia by about 4,400 years ago, which may have led to collapses in the population there, a new genetic analysis suggests.

That preliminary finding raises the possibility that plague-induced die offs influenced the genetic structure of northeast Asians who trekked to North America starting perhaps 5,500 years ago. If the result holds up, it, along with other newly uncovered insights into human population dynamics in the region, would unveil a more complex ancestry among those ancient travelers than has usually been assumed.

A team led by evolutionary geneticists Gülşah Merve Kilinç and Anders Götherström, both of Stockholm University, extracted DNA from the remains of 40 human skeletons previously excavated in parts of eastern Siberia. Among those samples, DNA from Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes plague, was found in two ancient Siberians, the researchers report January 6 in Science Advances. One person lived around 4,400 years ago. The other dated to roughly 3,800 years ago.

It’s unclear how the plague bacterium first reached Siberia or whether it caused widespread infections and death, Götherström says. But he and his colleagues found that genetic diversity in their ancient samples of human DNA declined sharply from around 4,700 to 4,400 years ago, possibly the result of population collapse. ...
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FULL STORY: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/plague-bacteria-die-offs-ancient-siberians-genetics-dna

Here are the bibliographic details for the published article. The full article is accessible at the link below.

Human population dynamics and Yersinia pestis in ancient northeast Asia
Gülşah Merve Kılınç, Natalija Kashuba, Dilek Koptekin, Nora Bergfeldt, Handan Melike Dönertaş, Ricardo Rodríguez-Varela, et al.
Science Advances 06 Jan 2021:Vol. 7, no. 2, eabc4587
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abc4587

SOURCE (& FULL PAPER):
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/2/eabc4587
 
Newly published research results suggest the Black Death's history and timetable have been grossly oversimplified. It now appears the plague was moving westward from eastern Asia a century earlier than commonly claimed.
Did the Black Death Rampage Across the World a Century Earlier Than Previously Thought?

For over 20 years, I’ve been telling the same story to students whenever I teach European history. At some point in the 14th century, the bacterium Yersinia pestis somehow moved out of the rodent population in western China and became wildly infectious and lethal to humans. This bacterium caused the Black Death, a plague pandemic that moved from Asia to Europe in just a few decades, wiping out one-third to one-half of all human life wherever it touched. ...

In December, the historian Monica Green published a landmark article, The Four Black Deaths, in the American Historical Review, that rewrites our narrative of this brutal and transformative pandemic. In it, she identifies a “big bang” that created four distinct genetic lineages that spread separately throughout the world and finds concrete evidence that the plague was already spreading from China to central Asia in the 1200s. This discovery pushes the origins of the Black Death back by over a hundred years, meaning that the first wave of the plague was not a decades-long explosion of horror, but a disease that crept across the continents for over a hundred years until it reached a crisis point. ...
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FULL STORY: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/hist...ld-more-century-previously-thought-180977331/
 
Here are the bibliographic details and abstract of the published report on this new historical research.

Monica H. Green
The Four Black Deaths
The American Historical Review, Volume 125, Issue 5, December 2020, Pages 1601–1631
https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhaa511

Abstract
The Black Death, often called the largest pandemic in human history, is conventionally defined as the massive plague outbreak of 1346 to 1353 C.E. that struck the Black Sea and Mediterranean, extended into the Middle East, North Africa, and western Europe, and killed as much as half the total population of those regions. Yet genetic approaches to plague’s history have established that Yersinia pestis, the causative organism of plague, suddenly diverged in Central Asia at some point before the Black Death, splitting into four new branches—a divergence geneticists have called the “Big Bang.” Drawing on a “biological archive” of genetic evidence, I trace the bacterial descendants of the Big Bang proliferation, comparing that data to historical human activities in and around the area of plague’s emergence. The Mongols, whose empire emerged in 1206, unwittingly moved plague through Central Eurasia in the thirteenth, not the fourteenth, century. Grain shipments that the Mongols brought with them to several sieges, including the siege of Baghdad, were the most likely mechanism of transmission. The fourteenth century plague outbreaks represent local spillover events out of the new plague reservoirs seeded by the military campaigns of the thirteenth century.

SOURCE: https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/125/5/1601/6040962?redirectedFrom=fulltext
 
EnolaGaia said:
Here are the bibliographic details and abstract of the published report on this new historical research.

Monica H. Green
The Four Black Deaths
The American Historical Review, Volume 125, Issue 5, December 2020, Pages 1601–1631
https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhaa511

Abstract
The Black Death, often called the largest pandemic in human history, is conventionally defined as the massive plague outbreak of 1346 to 1353 C.E. that struck the Black Sea and Mediterranean, extended into the Middle East, North Africa, and western Europe, and killed as much as half the total population of those regions. Yet genetic approaches to plague’s history have established that Yersinia pestis, the causative organism of plague, suddenly diverged in Central Asia at some point before the Black Death, splitting into four new branches—a divergence geneticists have called the “Big Bang.” Drawing on a “biological archive” of genetic evidence, I trace the bacterial descendants of the Big Bang proliferation, comparing that data to historical human activities in and around the area of plague’s emergence. The Mongols, whose empire emerged in 1206, unwittingly moved plague through Central Eurasia in the thirteenth, not the fourteenth, century. Grain shipments that the Mongols brought with them to several sieges, including the siege of Baghdad, were the most likely mechanism of transmission. The fourteenth century plague outbreaks represent local spillover events out of the new plague reservoirs seeded by the military campaigns of the thirteenth century.

SOURCE: https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/125/5/1601/6040962?redirectedFrom=fulltext
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It comes as no suprise that the Mongals spread the plague considering the prevalence of marmots in Mongolia, which carry the pneumonic plague.
 
Souleater said:
It comes as no suprise that the Mongals spread the plague considering the prevalence of marmots in Mongolia, which carry the pneumonic plague.
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Yeah, they brought them along as pets. They got them to dance the Khan, Khan.

marmot.jpg
 
EnolaGaia said:
Here are the bibliographic details and abstract of the published report on this new historical research.

Monica H. Green
The Four Black Deaths
The American Historical Review, Volume 125, Issue 5, December 2020, Pages 1601–1631
https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhaa511

Abstract
The Black Death, often called the largest pandemic in human history, is conventionally defined as the massive plague outbreak of 1346 to 1353 C.E. that struck the Black Sea and Mediterranean, extended into the Middle East, North Africa, and western Europe, and killed as much as half the total population of those regions. Yet genetic approaches to plague’s history have established that Yersinia pestis, the causative organism of plague, suddenly diverged in Central Asia at some point before the Black Death, splitting into four new branches—a divergence geneticists have called the “Big Bang.” Drawing on a “biological archive” of genetic evidence, I trace the bacterial descendants of the Big Bang proliferation, comparing that data to historical human activities in and around the area of plague’s emergence. The Mongols, whose empire emerged in 1206, unwittingly moved plague through Central Eurasia in the thirteenth, not the fourteenth, century. Grain shipments that the Mongols brought with them to several sieges, including the siege of Baghdad, were the most likely mechanism of transmission. The fourteenth century plague outbreaks represent local spillover events out of the new plague reservoirs seeded by the military campaigns of the thirteenth century.

SOURCE: https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/125/5/1601/6040962?redirectedFrom=fulltext
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The plague suddenly diverged before the Black Death? This is the plague that they have tracked back to Neolithic times? There was a rather nice paper about it being found in ancient Sweden last year.
 
Plague is not unique to one species or to Mongols. It is endemic in rodents who are frequented by the affected species of fleas. Anywhere rats and mice and who knows marmots went, by ship or horseback or on foot , the plague went. We need to stop pointing fingers at one or another group of people. The spread is a mechanism that is not controllable. It's limited now in the US because of active public health education and eradication campaigns, but it's spreading slowly to the east coast.
 
Lb8535 said:
Plague is not unique to one species or to Mongols. It is endemic in rodents who are frequented by the affected species of fleas. Anywhere rats and mice and who knows marmots went, by ship or horseback or on foot , the plague went. We need to stop pointing fingers at one or another group of people. The spread is a mechanism that is not controllable. It's limited now in the US because of active public health education and eradication campaigns, but it's spreading slowly to the east coast.
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No plague in the UK at all.

"Plague is not found in the UK, but occurs in several countries in Africa, Asia, South America and the USA. Between 2010 and 2015, there were 3,248 cases reported worldwide. Annually, most human cases occur in Africa, with Madagascar considered to be the most highly endemic country. See WHO map of global cases."

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/plague-epidemiology-outbreaks-and-guidance
 
Souleater said:
No plague in the UK at all.

"Plague is not found in the UK, but occurs in several countries in Africa, Asia, South America and the USA. Between 2010 and 2015, there were 3,248 cases reported worldwide. Annually, most human cases occur in Africa, with Madagascar considered to be the most highly endemic country. See WHO map of global cases."

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/plague-epidemiology-outbreaks-and-guidance
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Yes because it's an island with controllable borders, the UK has been able to eradicate rabies as well. In the US there is a team whose permanent work includes sampling rodent colonies in areas of the West and when one is found testing positive, the entire colony is killed off.
 
Souleater said:
No plague in the UK at all.

"Plague is not found in the UK, but occurs in several countries in Africa, Asia, South America and the USA. Between 2010 and 2015, there were 3,248 cases reported worldwide. Annually, most human cases occur in Africa, with Madagascar considered to be the most highly endemic country. See WHO map of global cases."

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/plague-epidemiology-outbreaks-and-guidance
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There was an outbreak of what is believed to have been plague here in 1910:

1D75BA42-1DE3-49B5-80B0-385D9474C02B.png


Latimer Cottages, Freston, Suffolk.

https://earth.app.goo.gl/?link=http...us=googleearth&cid=3022671765819975691&_icp=1

Account.

maximus otter
 
The earliest known strain of plague has been identified in 5,000-year-old remains from Latvia. Researchers suspect the victim most probably contracted the disease from a beaver bite.
Earliest known strain of plague could have come from a beaver bite

Scientists have found the earliest known strain of plague in the remains of a 5000-year-old hunter gatherer.

The "astonishing" discovery pushes back the first appearance of the plague bacterium (Yersina Pestis) by more than 2,000 years ... This date is probably close to when the bacteria first evolved ...

The plague-carrying hunter-gatherer, dubbed "RV 2039", was a 20- to 30-year-old man and one of four people whose remains were excavated from a burial site near the Baltic Sea in Latvia. ... Researchers reconstructed the bacteria’s genome using genome sequencing, and believe the bacteria was likely a part of a lineage that emerged roughly 7,000 years ago, not long after Yersina Pestis split from a predecessor, Yersina pseudotuberculosis. ...

Modern plague variants contain one important thing that the newly-discovered ancient strain lacked — a gene enabling fleas to carry the disease. This adaptation hugely increased the rate at which the plague bacteria could infect human hosts ...

Because this early strain of Y. pestis was not yet flea-borne, the scientists think that the bacteria originally entered the hunter-gatherer’s body through a rodent bite, possibly from a beaver, a common carrier of the plague predecessor Y. pseudotuberculosis and the species with the most remains recorded at the site. ...
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FULL STORY: https://www.livescience.com/5000-year-old-man-had-plague.html
 
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