Health : The Atlantic: A U.S. Squirrel Has the Plague: Are We All Going to Die?

Health : The Atlantic Health news and analysis on The Atlantic.

A U.S. Squirrel Has the Plague: Are We All Going to Die? Jul 29th 2013, 18:09, by James Hamblin Setting rat traps, Hugh Stenson uses raisin bread dipped in bacon fat as bait, at the site of an abandoned fish cannery on a pier in San Francisco in 1963. Stenson was head of the rodent control unit at the U.S. Public Health field station in San Francisco, which guarded against bubonic plague. The unit caught as many as 10,000 rats a year in San Francisco. (Robert W. Klein/AP) We learned last week that  campgrounds outside of outside of Los Angeles were closed after a squirrel tested positive for the bubonic plague. Some people thought that was strange and scary. Does this mean we're all going to die? Well we are, but not of bubonic plague. The plague has a bad name mainly because of the time in the fourteenth century when it killed a third of the human population. Other epidemics in the nineteenth century in China and India also killed millions. The U.S., though, has been relatively spared. In 1925, Los Angeles weathered a much smaller epidemic of bubonic plague -- the bacterium having been introduced to the U.S. in 1900 via rat-infested ships from Asia -- but that was the last urban epidemic we've had in the U.S. Unlike seemingly esoteric infectious diseases like smallpox, of which there hasn't been an organic case since 1977, a handful of Americans still get diagnosed with the plague every year. We saw as many as 40 cases in 1983. This is the same plague that killed Europe so long ago, and it can be fatal, but it has a good prognosis when treated with antibiotics. Cases of Bubonic Plague, 1970-2012 CDC Humans are incidental hosts of the bacteria that causes the plague (Yersinia pestis) which is mainly affects out animals. It can and does regularly wipe out prairie dog colonies in a matter of days, maybe just to remind us how powerful it is. (Though it actually helps control prairie dog overpopulation.) Bubonic plague is usually spread by getting bitten by an infected flea. When you get a bite, within a couple days you get a fever, headache, chills, and weakness, and one or more swollen, painful lymph nodes. That's called a bubo. Which sounds cute but is not. About half of untreated cases will progress to pneumonia and/or infection of the blood. Then called pneumonic and septicemic plague, that's when people's limbs start turning black and it's deadly (Black Death). Seven-year-old Sierra Jane Downing smiles during a news conference about her recovery from bubonic plague at the Rocky Mountain Hospital for Children in Denver, September 2012. It is believed Downing caught the bubonic plague from burying a dead squirrel. (Jack Dempsey/AP) There are still parts of the world where bubonic plague mortality rates are high. The World Health Organization records between 1,000 and 2,000 cases every year, though they're likely missing many that go unreported. Cases of Bubonic Plague, 2000-2009 Dots placed in center of affected countries (CDC, Data via World Health Organization) The California campgrounds where the offending squirrel resided will be closed for "at least seven days." After that, happy camping! General preventive guidelines still apply, though, as always. ("Do not pick up or touch dead animals.")

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