2020: The Hold My Beer Year https://t.co/K2xEcwAYjG— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) July 6, 2020
CDC:
Plague occurs naturally in the western United States, particularly Arizona, California, Colorado, and New Mexico. The plague bacterium (Yersinia pestis) is transmitted by fleas and cycles naturally among wild rodents. Plague can also infect humans and their pets.
Although you can't catch your cat's sniffles, your pet can give you the plague. We're talking Black Death-style bubonic plague. But kitty isn't evil -- it's just a passive carrier, or vector, of disease like many other animals. HIV passed to humans through chimpanzees and severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, started in China from infected badgers and palm civets.
But how could your cat catch the plague? If you live in Arizona, New Mexico or Colorado -- states which historically have the highest incidence of bubonic plague in the United States -- your cat could possibly ingest the plague bacterium by eating an infected prairie dog.
Prairie dogs are only one of many rodent species that are susceptible to plague. Seventy-six species of mammals have been shown to carry fleas infected with plague. Plague is a disease caused by bacterium that is transmitted by infected fleas and maintained in the environment in a flea-rodent cycle. Plague is found in rodents and their associated fleas throughout the Western U.S.. Prairie dogs are not silent, long-term reservoirs of plague; instead over 95% of prairie dogs will die within 78 hours of infection with plague. Because of this, prairie dogs can be an indicator species for the presence of plague circulating in other rodent species in an area. The loss of a prairie dog colony over the course of a few weeks, in absence of human control, strongly indicates the presence of plague. If you see an active prairie dog colony, plague probably is not present in that colony.
Plague is transmitted to people through fleabites or direct contact with bodily fluids of infected animals, but it is primarily a disease of wild rodents. Numerous species of rodents have been involved in Colorado’s human cases particularly rock squirrels and wood rats because they often live in or near people’s homes.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states that, “The number of human plague infections is low when compared to diseases caused by other agents, yet plague invokes an intense, irrational fear, disproportionate to its transmission potential in the post-antibiotic/vaccination era.” Fears of humans contracting plague from prairie dogs are often exaggerated and sometimes even used as an excuse for extermination. According to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment statistics, of the 51 plague cases in Colorado since 1957, only 7 cases, one a fatality, were directly linked to prairie dogs. In four other cases prairie dogs and other rodents species were found infected in the area. Of those 7 cases two were related to people skinning prairie dogs, two were the result of family pets bringing home fleas after being allowed to roam freely in prairie dog colonies and three were people infected from working, playing or hiking in infected colonies.
The Colorado Department of Health states, “If precautions are taken, the probability of an individual contracting plague, even in an active plague area, is quite low.” Eric Stone, wildlife biologist for The US Fish & Wildlife Service at Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge confirms, "Contracting the Plague is very unlikely even if a person is walking through or living near a prairie dog colony. The fleas that carry plague stay in, and around the burrows, so as long as a person or their pets are not coming in contact with the fleas, it is unlikely that they will contract plague."
The most common means of human infection is from being exposed to rodent fleas in areas where rodents are dying from plague. Pet cats and dogs have also been implicated in human cases by bringing home infected fleas or in the case of cats contracting plague by catching and eating infected animals or by being bitten by infected fleas. Even though the risk of human infection is low, people working in or near prairie dog colonies should be familiar with the symptoms of plague. Please visit http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dvbid/plague/index.htm to learn more. Plague is easily treatable with antibiotics and readily curable in humans if diagnosed and treated early.
And finally, a personal anecdote: my daughter, the Golden Child, attended a college in New Mexico (Santa Fe, to be precise) with an active prairie dog colony on the campus. Everyone on campus, even the parents, were warned to avoid the prairie dogs as they were a known vector for plague. That's all; just don't get near them (fleas are prodigious jumpers for their size, but not that prodigious). As long as you don't eat one, or let your cat eat one, you should be fine. After all, when was the last time you heard of an outbreak of plague in Arizona, Colorado, or New Mexico? Did you even know the disease was prevalent in the rodent wildlife there?
You can live with zoonotic diseases. Sometimes.
P.S. (Public Service):
The mischief of using a national health curriculum in middle school: My daughter came home one day, from health class, a little disturbed because they had seen a film on the plague, which reassuringly ended with the words, "But Americans don't have anything to worry about, because today it only exists in New Mexico."
Though it seems reassuringly distant and past, a year or so ago I was talking with a friend, and it turns out a friend of hers died of it.
I'm reminded of the anecdotes of people in New Mexico trying to place orders on the phone in the days before Amazon/internet shopping, and getting confused Northeastern employees who thought "Mexico" and "New Mexico" were the same country, and neither one this one. And all the attention Lyme Disease got because, well, it affected people where the media centers were (or where people working in media lived, same difference).
Plague is nothing to sneeze at. It's plague, after all. But it's prevalence in the American West points to how we can control some truly dreadful diseases, and how badly we've let coronovirus run rampant. A Chinese government newspaper accuses the U.S. of being the new epicenter of a disease that threatens the world. They aren't entirely wrong.
The mischief of using a national health curriculum in middle school: My daughter came home one day, from health class, a little disturbed because they had seen a film on the plague, which reassuringly ended with the words, "But Americans don't have anything to worry about, because today it only exists in New Mexico."
ReplyDeleteThough it seems reassuringly distant and past, a year or so ago I was talking with a friend, and it turns out a friend of hers died of it.