Squirrel in Colorado tests positive for the bubonic plague

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CBS News

That happens,that region of the US is prone to pestis bacteria and every few years Colorado or Utah spawns a small bubonic plague outbreak.Nothing to worry about,low population density in the region and antibiotics will cure it.

Yes. Thats old news. Bubonic plague is endemic (or en-zoo-dic) among the rodents of the Four Corners Region (where Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah all meet). Individual campers have come down with the plague every now and again in the region for decades.

How fast everybody has forgotten when coronavirus was just a few cases and just a hyped version of the flu.

Expect to read a lot of these type stories. Most of these will turn out to false alarms a product of a combination of post Covid hypervigilance and hype machines taking advantage. But with a combination of disaster fatigue and a country in such a mess it seems inevitable that one or more of these stories will be the next actual disaster that was ignored.

Prairie dogs can carry it.They are all over that area.My son tried to stuff an alpine chipmunk into his pocket when we were in Colorado and of course it bit him ,we were sort of worried but our doctor said as long as it looked healthy and was acting normal.It was and he was fine.
Hantavirus pops up in that region also.

There a particular news site on the web thats hyping this squirrel as "the first case of plague in the US" ever, when in fact the American West has had cases of plague since 1900. There was a big outbreak in 1900 at ports caused by rats in ships, but then the epidemic subsided among humans, but the fleas went from urban rats to wild rural rodents, and has been endemic is some corners of the west ever since. One website says that an average of seven human hunters/hikers comes down with it each year in the US west.

Bubonic plague never actually died out all together,it has popped quite a bit in history after 1349 AD.By the 1350's people had built an immunity and cases dwindled but periodically came back from time to time.

Now with modern medicine it hardly causes problems anymore but the bacteria is still around.The southwestern US and central Asia are common hotspots.

The origin of the great bubonic plague was the Mongolian black rat which followed trade routes opened by the empire of Gengis Khan in the 13th century.It did not do very much damage in central Asia because the steppe had large amounts of land for grazing animals and there was not mass amounts of garbage lying around to attract rodents.

The plague did some damage in cities in east Asia but cities were clean and damage was not to bad and the plague also spread through the Islamic world.But much of the Islamic world was still dessert and the cities didn't have large amounts of garbage lying around and less animals other than camels used for transportation.

Once the plague hit southern Italy and France in about 1347 or 1348 it spread like fire because garbage was left out in the streets which attracted mass amounts of rodents and there wasn't a lot of grazing land and people lived in close proximity to animals.A family then might have shared a small home with a goat or chickens or something and these conditions were the perfect breeding ground for the plague to spread to millions quickly.

50% of Italy and France were lost and places like Germany or England about a third of the population were lost.

Today there are no grazing animals living inside peoples houses in suburban areas and garbage is collected routinely so there are not the conditions for another mass outbreak of the plague.