Pacific Standard by Jack Denton Feb 6, 2019
Last month, a third cat in Wyoming was diagnosed with the plague, two years after a massive outbreak in Madagascar. Are amoebas or rodents to blame?
Sniffles, coughing, fever, aches and pain, swollen lymph nodes, vomiting, and diarrhea. It's that time once more: the bubonic plague is again upon us.
Last month, a third cat in Wyoming was diagnosed with the plague, precipitating a warning from state health officials. Though the disease is most famous for causing the Black Death in the 14th century, the plague is still very much with us. According to the Wyoming Department of Health, about seven human infections occur in the United States each year. Globally, hundreds, at minimum.
All of these infections stem from one definitive sickness: the bubonic plague—the plague. Or rather, it's one of the three potential forms that the disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis can take. Its name comes from the swollen lymph nodes, where infected cells, known as buboes, tend to congregate. Plague caused by Yersinia pestis can also manifest as pneumonic plague, in which the infection is focused in the lungs, and can be spread by coughing airborne droplets. The final form is the truly horrific septicemic plague, in which the infection spreads to the blood, turning body tissue a frostbite black.
Our world is filled with so many plagues—bubonic, sure, but also locusts, the flu, climate change, Starbucks, Twitter—but few have had as severe an impact as the plague. "Bubonic plague is by far the most common, and the most iconic plague,"—both historically and now, says David Markman, a biologist who will receive his Ph.D. from Colorado State University next month.
According to University of Oslo biologist Nils Christian Stenseth no other documented disease outbreak comes close to the lethality of the Black Death, which killed off 50 percent of Europe's population at the time—hundreds of millions of people. The Plague of Justinian killed tens of millions of people around the rim of the Mediterranean Sea nearly a millennium before the Black Death, and a third pandemic spread globally from China's Yunnan province at the turn of the 20th century. Historical records document numerous smaller plague outbreaks between these larger pandemics.
More:
https://psmag.com/environment/the-bubonic-plague-til-death-do-we-part