The plague is endemic in fleas on rodents and small wild animals
in the US Southwest. Most people who contract it are
first treated with antibiotics after presenting with
the typical symptoms, and only a few days later
do the test results confirm the presumed diagnosis.
The riskiest situation is exposure to plague and
then quickly traveling
to some other location where plague is rarely seen,
and doctors at the destination do not know to look
at the symptoms as possibly plague,
and to tentatively treat for plague
before testing confirms the diagnosis. Medical groups
in New Mexico have several time done public awareness
programs using the tag line: “Land of the flea, home of the plague.”
Yep. And hantavirus is carried by rodents, rather than fleas, mostly west of the Mississippi in many states.
Actually, there are about a half dozen terrible, rodent-borne human-transmissible diseases at this link (except Lassa is in Africa, not the US that I know of):
I mean, bubonic has been been around for a while, and as far as threats go it's not exactly the highest on the list. Cholera, malaria, influenza, etc are all quite a bit more dangerous to society, as is coronavirus while it's actively spreading.
35 years ago I dated a Continental airlines stewardess who told me as a young girl she was diagnosed with the bubonic plague and treated. They never discovered where she picked it up as a young girl in Texas.
Nice illogical, racist rant. In case you don't understand science (and it seems like you don't), the bubonic plague doesn't care what its victims' beliefs are.
"In 2015, 16 people in the Western United States developed plague, including 2 cases in Yosemite National Park.[20] These US cases usually occur in rural northern New Mexico, northern Arizona, southern Colorado, California, southern Oregon, and far western Nevada."
I was using it as an example. The fact that they pay poachers to supposedly heal their livers or joints or whatnot doesn't change anything: Chinese traditional medicine is still cruel, pointless and frankly based on primitive animistic beliefs from the stone age. How it can co-exist with modern-day industry in China is beyond me, but it's an important factor in the decline of lots of animals. And you don't see any greenies protest Chinese medicine, they care only about carbon dioxide nowadays.
But this particular case was because these people believed in primitive witch-doctor stuff. If Americans believed the same, there would be many more deaths there.
China just outlawed the consumption of wild animals. They're actively confiscating all wild animal meat. But since there is still a market for it, the ban could just make the prices go higher and the situation could effectively worsen.
They implemented a ban on ivory a couple of years ago as well. But this ban should have been implemented earlier.
They should debunk and ban traditional medicine as unscientific paleolithic drivel. Then there won't be a market for those components, and lots of animals, from pangolin to the rhinoceros, will feel better. As well as decreasing diseases. Don't forget that the coronavirus pandemic started because of Chinese appetites for consumption of exotic animals.
Well, consider that in the US, televangelists sell cures for cancer and even coronavirus. Some people in this country also read horoscopes and consult psychics.
Yet, the US is not an unscientific paleolithic society. Superstition will always exist because ignorance is the natural state of the human mind.
When you are ignorant you can believe anything: like that eating ground horns or other phallic exotic animal products will make you virile, or you may believe that raising funds to buy a private jet for an ignorant preacher that never read the sacred book he preaches about will gain you the favor of a bearded male deity that cares about what happens in a rock in the middle of nowhere, or you may also believe that doing something for 10000 hours equals mastery.
The riskiest situation is exposure to plague and then quickly traveling to some other location where plague is rarely seen, and doctors at the destination do not know to look at the symptoms as possibly plague, and to tentatively treat for plague before testing confirms the diagnosis. Medical groups in New Mexico have several time done public awareness programs using the tag line: “Land of the flea, home of the plague.”
https://www.cdc.gov/plague/maps/index.html