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Animal Connection Challenges
Published in Michael Hehenberger, Zhi Xia, Huanming Yang, Our Animal Connection, 2020
Michael Hehenberger, Zhi Xia, Huanming Yang
Plague or the “black death” is the disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. It was most likely carried by fleas living on black rats that may have first spread by traveling on merchant ships. However, the major Black Death pandemic described below was in large part spread by human fleas which cause a pneumonic version of the plague. Pneumonic plague enables person-to-person infection via aerosols, thus explaining the very quick inland spread of the epidemic, which was faster than would be expected if only caused by rat fleas. From 541 to 750, the first plague pandemic, starting with the Plague of Justinian, killed between 50% and 60% of Europe’s population.The Black Death (1347–1352) killed 25 million people in Europe. This second plague pandemic reduced the world population by 75–100 million, from about 450 million to 350–375 million.
Biological Terrorist Agents
Published in Robert A. Burke, Counter-Terrorism for Emergency Responders, 2017
Plague (Yersinia pestis) is a zoonotic bacterium that is normally spread among rodents by infected fleas (Figure 9.13). Zoonotic bacteria are capable of being transmitted from lower animals to humans under natural conditions. Transmission occurs through the bite of a flea or through inhalation. Plague is usually found in the western part of the United States (Figure 9.14). Three forms of the disease can affect humans: BubonicPneumonicPrimary septicemic
Environment-Related Infectious Diseases
Published in Barry L. Johnson, Maureen Y. Lichtveld, Environmental Policy and Public Health, 2017
Barry L. Johnson, Maureen Y. Lichtveld
Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome and bubonic plague: Although hantavirus pulmonary syndrome is caused by a virus (hantavirus; family Bunyaviridae) and the bubonic plague by a bacterium (Yersinia pestis), both infectious diseases are transmitted by rodents. The bubonic plague, also known as the Plague or Black Death, arrived in Europe from Asia during the fourteenth century by ships infested with infected rats. Yersinia pestis can be transmitted to humans by infected flea or rat bite, or pneumonically from person to person. Due to its high case-fatality rate of 30%–60%, the Plague killed approximately 50 million people in Europe within 4 years of becoming endemic, reducing the population by 60%. Large epidemics of the Plague occurred throughout the centuries but the impact of the disease was greatly mitigated in the nineteenth century due to modern sanitation, public health practices, and medical advances and antibiotics which reduced its mortality rate to 11% [101]. Nowadays, small outbreaks or single cases of infections of the bubonic plague are still reported worldwide. In the U.S., 1006 human plague cases occurred between 1900 and 2012. Most of the bubonic plague cases occur in rural or semi-rural areas in the southwestern states of New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado. Transmission occurs mostly through flea or rodent (including squirrels, chipmunks, or rats) bites, and are rarely due to person to person contact [102]. All cases of bubonic plague must be reported to the CDC and WHO.
Spatial prediction of flea index of transmitting plague based on environmental similarity
Published in Annals of GIS, 2020
Haiwen Du, A-Xing Zhu, Yong Wang
Plague is a natural infectious disease which has a high mortality rate and has killed 200 million people in the history of three world plague epidemics (Stenseth et al. 2008). The global plague prevalence has been rising since the 1990s (Zhang et al. 2016). In 2017, Madagascar reported plague outbreak cases, which led to the deaths of 202 people (WHO, 2017). The plague is mainly transmitted through infected fleas that exchange and transfer Yersinia pestis to different rodent hosts (flea-bitten rats) over geographical landscape where the infected rats live. When humans enter this environment they can be infected (Fang et al. 2012). Studies have shown that an outbreak is likely to occur if the flea index is higher (Singchai et al. 2003). Thus, spatial prediction of flea index is a vital method of preventing and controlling plague and is receiving increasing attention in the plague preventing and controlling communities (Zhao and Yin 2016).
Colonial rodent control in Tanganyika and the application of ecological frameworks
Published in Annals of Science, 2023
Meanwhile, another crisis was brewing in the north of Tanganyika. Health officers were dispatching reports about locals falling ill with severe pneumonia. They were feverish and coughed up thick blood-stained sputum. Other officers reported seeing gravely ill people with swellings of pus under their necks and arms. Within two months, between December 1930 and January 1931, nine people, including one child, had died of pneumonic and bubonic plague.4 Toward the end of the nineteenth-century, scientists in Hong Kong had been able to work out that transmission of the ‘plague bacillus’ was the causative agent of this infectious disease. Later studies showed that the disease was transmitted from small mammals to humans when fleas feeding on blood from an infected rodent, for instance, subsequently fed on human blood. As fleas suck on human blood, they regurgitate the bacteria, which in 1944 was named Yersinia pestis, into the human bloodstream. Y. pestis would then spread to the lymph nodes and cause swelling and tissue death.5 When news of pneumonic and bubonic plague began emerging all across the northern area and lake shores of Tanganyika, this spurred the Department of Medical and Sanitary Services to take quick and drastic action against rodents. Medical officers sent requests to the Secretariat in Dar es Salaam, requesting funds for rodent traps and poisons. By May 1931, plague had spread as far as Nzega and Shinyanga Districts, threateningly near the Central Railway Line, which could then transport stowaway rodents and fleas all the way to the ports at Kigoma and Dar es Salaam that connected Tanganyika to the global economy.