Via CIDRAP: NEWS SCAN: Plague in New Mexico, cholera in 3 countries, measles update. Excerpt:
A 78-year-old man from Santa Fe County has contracted New Mexico's second case of bubonic plague in less than a month, according to the New Mexico Department of Health (NMDH).
The man is recovering in a hospital, according to a department news release. The first case was confirmed May 6 in a 58-year-old man from the same county who also was hospitalized but is now recovering at home.
"We are seeing plague activity in both humans and animals from many different locations of north-central New Mexico," said NMDH Secretary Dr. Catherine Torres. "Everyone needs to be aware of the situation and take precautions to avoid rodents and their fleas."
Plague, a bacterial disease, is generally transmitted to humans through the bites of infected fleas but can also be transmitted by direct contact with infected animals, including rodents, other wildlife, and pets, according to the NMDH.
"Preventing your pets from roaming and hunting rodents, using a flea control product on all your pets, and not allowing them to sleep in bed with you are three things you can do to decrease your risk of being bitten by an infected flea," said NMDH public health veterinarian Dr. Paul Ettestad.
Last month the department announced it had detected the disease in pets in two counties, including Santa Fe. In 2010 the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed only two human cases of plague in the United States, both in Oregon.
Most people in the US Southwest know plague is endemic in their region. Few know that it's a direct result of the racist stupidity of San Francisco officials in 1900, when plague came ashore and found a home in the slums where Chinese labourers were ghettoized.
Terrified of most American doctors, the Chinese smuggled their plague patients (living and dead) out of the city. Plague went with them, and soon migrated to local squirrels and other rodents. Eventually, plague arrived in the Southwest and there it has stayed.
One mixed consolation: Dr. Rupert Blue led the fight against rats in 1900 and again in 1906-1910, after the San Francisco earthquake led to a resurgence in plague from displaced rats. He treated the Chinese like human beings, and won their trust. Then he stamped out plague, and went on to become, simultaneously, the head of the American Medical Association and the US Surgeon General. If you're an American, you probably owe Dr. Blue your life.
As well as founding the US Public Health Service, he was an early advocate of a national health-insurance system. If he hadn't been fought so bitterly by American physicians, millions of other Americans might have lived longer, healthier lives over the past century.
I learned all this from a wonderful book by Marilyn Chase, The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco, which I reviewed in The Tyee way back in early 2006.
