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A Plague of Men, and Dogs |
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Tabitha111
Adviser Group Joined: January 11 2020 Location: Virginia Status: Offline Points: 11640 |
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Posted: July 19 2020 at 7:17am |
A Plague of Men, and Dogs, and Marmots By Maureen Anderson on July 19, 2020 Taking a break from the latest pandemic microbe, there have been a couple of recent items about another very old pandemic bug that’s never really completely gone away – Yersina pestis, known commonly as plague, and the cause of the Black Death of the mid 1300s, aka the deadliest pandemic recorded in human history. Even though we now know what causes plague (a bacterium) and how its transmitted (primarily by fleas, but also some routes of direct transmission), its various forms (bubonic, pneumonic and septicemic) and even how to treat it (antibiotics), this disease still rears its ugly head periodically in various parts of the world, including North America. There are a few noteworthy points about these two cases: The dogs were both from an endemic area where plague is known to circulate in the wildlife population, but clinical infection in dogs is uncommon, and infection with the pneumonic form in dogs is exceedingly rare. The pneumonic form of the disease is particularly dangerous for others, as infected animals (or people) can expel the bacteria in their sputum when they cough. Four cases of plague in people were detected due to exposure to one of these dogs, but the public health investigation involved contact tracing of over 100 people in each case. The lobar pattern seen on radiographs in both dogs is also atypical, so these animals had an uncommon presentation of an uncommon disease that is even more uncommon in this species, and in one case it was also outside of the typical transmission season for plague – not an easy diagnosis to make right away. The automated bacterial identification systems used in these cases also delayed the diagnoses. It is really important to rule out plague in animals with compatible signs, even if they’re not “typical” or at the typical time of year, when they live in (or have visited) an endemic area – for the health of the animal and the people handling it. More recently, on the other side of the world in Mongolia where this same bacterium is also endemic, an outbreak of bubonic plague in people has been linked to marmots (a kind of large rodent, similar to a groundhog). Plague is a classic example of one of the many pathogens with which we coexist, and which is unbounded by time, space or species. Image: A female Oriental rat flea, Xenopsylla cheopis. (CDC Public Health Image Library 22259) |
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