keep your flea powder handy!

[Smokeys Kitchen]

Originally Posted by mikedefieslife

Of course there is also Bubonic plague in LA, or is it SF. Don't they often find it in squirrels. Think it's pretty common in Yosemite too.

Antibiotics should do the trick. Of course if you are from the UK you've got no chance of your doctor getting you some 'just in case'

Having spent 11 years in North Lake Tahoe, I agree. The level of the plague infestation there seemed to rise and fall on the intensity of the winter, since more severe winters killed a lot of the carriers - squirrels, chipmunks, other rodents, and the fleas associated with them. The disease there was never pneumonic though, just from contacts with the infected carriers. The occurrences I was most familiar with happened to tourists who thought it was cute to feed the squirrels and received bites in return.

As Atoll has pointed out, the pneumonic form is much more deadly due to the ability of the disease to spread in a much quicker fashion. I am sure the epidemiologists at the CDC and the health care providers in Africa will be very busy

[Bulawayo]

Madagascar is a favourite of ours and is constantly suffering from these outbreaks. We always have tetracycline for this very reason and also carry enough to distribute on an emergency basis. I say we....hard to change the habit of the last 30 years now to just I.

Originally Posted by JPA Cate

Atoll,

That's awful!

I saw the pic of the person getting a shot--is there vaccine against it? [and enough available?]

Ann

[trifan]

Pneumonic plague - spread by airborne droplets person-to-person. Nasty stuff. Very virulent. Antibiotic resistance worries are driving research (using CRISPR) into bacteria killers that use retroviruses. Fascinating stuff, that and real 21st century tech. There have been some successes against certain cancers, encouraging enough to go after denge and other plagues. The main problem is research funding. There's money enough for social programs but not for saving a few hundred poor souls in a 3rd world backwater. Sorry, I tend to get easily frustrated and not much frustrates an engineer more than waste.

So, keep your fingers crossed that some lab will deliver a wonder drug for an affordable price. It could happen ...