Bubonic Plague never went away and it doesn’t make much sense to vaccinate against it. It’s still carried primarily by fleas and other small blood drinking bugs, prairie dogs can also commonly carry it. Plague is treated relatively easily by antibiotics and isn’t usually fatal or likely to cause long term damage. As the title indicates there’re usually 7-10ish cases of plague per year in America and those are rarely fatal
Plague is a bacterial infection known as “The Black Death” …
This may not be true. Bubonic plague was certainly the cause of later epidemics, but the Black Death was very possibly something else that we don’t have other examples of. We don’t really know with certainty what it was.
Edit: Well, I’m wrong!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death#DNA_evidence
Definitive confirmation of the role of Y. pestis arrived in 2010 with a publication in PLOS Pathogens by Haensch et al.[4][c] They assessed the presence of DNA/RNA with polymerase chain reaction (PCR) techniques for Y. pestis from the tooth sockets in human skeletons from mass graves in northern, central and southern Europe that were associated archaeologically with the Black Death and subsequent resurgences. The authors concluded that this new research, together with prior analyses from the south of France and Germany, “ends the debate about the cause of the Black Death, and unambiguously demonstrates that Y. pestis was the causative agent of the epidemic plague that devastated Europe during the Middle Ages”.[4] In 2011 these results were further confirmed with genetic evidence derived from Black Death victims in the East Smithfield burial site in England. Schuenemann et al. concluded in 2011 “that the Black Death in medieval Europe was caused by a variant of Y. pestis that may no longer exist”.[59]
While there remains some suggestion that the Black Death was airborne transmission, and not only by fleas, that DNA research stands pretty strongly.
I saw this yesterday and had to re-read it a couple of times to make my brain grasp that, yes, the plague is still a thing.
Wild.
When I moved to New Mexico I was warned about prairie dogs carrying it. Its still with us but totally treatable when found in time.
