A couple of months BC (before COVID-19), I was planning a live simulation exercise for our hospital. The goal was to see how well we could identify and handle a nasty, reportable zoonotic disease, and to look at our personal protective equipment training and needs (COVID-19 helped with that last one, at least).
Here’s the
Taking a break from the latest pandemic microbe, there have been a couple of recent items about another very old pandemic bug that’s never really completely gone away – Yersina pestis, known commonly as plague, and the cause of the Black Death of the mid 1300s, aka the deadliest pandemic recorded in human history.
“One Health” gets talked about a lot these days, but is acted on much less often. Getting physicians and vets to talk is tough. Getting physicians to query animal contact is variably successful. Some get it and do it well, others don’t.
When I speak to human medical or public health groups about zoonotic diseases,
Plague… it’s a term that typically conjures up images of the devastating "Black Death", the pandemic that killed 75-200 million people in Europe back in the 14th century. Yet, it’s not just a historical disease. Plague is still present in a variety of small mammals in different regions worldwide (see map), including parts
Plague cases tend to get a lot of press. The fact that this disease killed a large percentage of the human population in a few different pandemics (albeit centuries ago for the most part) probably plays a role in that. Despite the impression by some that it’s just a historical disease, plague is alive and
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A month or two ago, there was a lot of press about the risks of pets sleeping in beds. It was in response to an article in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases that didn’t put forth any new information, but summarized a few diseases that could potentially be transmitted by pets. Unfortunately, the relative risk
The CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports has a short report about two plague cases in the US. Plague, while often thought of as a historical disease (the Black Death), is alive and well in wild rodents in some areas of the world, including parts of North America, and human cases continue to
In response to a case of plague in prairie dogs in Saskatchewan’s Grasslands National Park, park officials are dusting prairie dog burrows with insecticide to try to control fleas. A single case of plague, a serious bacterial infection caused by Yersinia pestis, was identified in a prairie dog in the park earlier
Plague has been identified in a dead prairie dog in Grasslands National Park in Saskatchewan, Canada. This disease, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, circulates in small wild mammals in some regions, and is spread by fleas. While plague is endemic in some parts of North America, it’s very rare in Canada. (The last
