By David K. Randall
May 16, 2019 | 3:15 AM
Bubonic plague bacteria taken from a patient in 2003. (Center for Disease Control / AFP / Getty Images)
The steamship caused the last global outbreak of bubonic plague. Climate change could cause the next one.
Longer, hotter weather patterns are extending the breeding season of rats and rodents, leading to a steep increase in their numbers in places like Los Angeles, New York and Houston. Over the last decade, urban rat populations are up by 15% to 20% worldwide, thanks to a combination of climate changes and a greater preference among humans for urban living, increasing the amount of trash available for scavengers, according to estimates from Bobby Corrigan, a rodent control consultant and one of the nation’s leading rat experts.
The swelling number of rodents isn’t just an urban nuisance. More importantly, all those additional rats and squirrels can serve as hosts for fleas carrying the plague-causing bacterium Yersinia pestis. The disease is already endemic among fleas that feast on rural squirrels in California, Arizona, Wyoming and other states. Climate change could make it possible for plague-carrying fleas to thrive in more places than they do now, bringing the disease into closer contact with humans.
“Any climate change conditions that increase the number of fleas [also increase] the distribution of plague,” said Dr. Janet Foley, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at UC Davis.
Already, public health officials increasingly find themselves battling rare and dangerous diseases associated with rats. An employee at Los Angeles City Hall who recently contracted typhus blamed the disease on flea bites she suffered as a result of the building’s rat infestation, while a cluster of patients suffering from the rare disease leptospirosis, an often-fatal condition spread by rat urine, were identified in the Bronx in 2017. An outbreak of bubonic plague due to contact with diseased squirrels prompted Russia to close its border with Mongolia last week.
While many major cities face the problem of increasing rat populations, Los Angeles finds itself in unique danger of disease because of its rapidly growing homeless crisis. As more people live in closer contact with rodent fleas that can carry the plague bacterium, preventing an outbreak of one of the most frightening diseases in human history will require a stronger push to eradicate potential hosts.
Eliminating rats and squirrels to save human lives saved Los Angeles once before. In 1924, fleas from an infected rat bit a man named Jesus Lajun who lived on what was then called Clara Street, near the current-day Twin Towers Correctional Facility downtown. Within six weeks, nearly everyone who had come into contact with Lajun during the roughly 48 hours between the time he caught the disease and the time he died from it was dead. The trail of victims included not only his immediate family members but also those of a neighbor who cared for him when he was too weak to leave the house.
HT/Cam_S
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Obviously just another good example of alarmist scare tactics:
I’m sure rats have been capable of breeding year-round in any of the named cities in any climate they’ve had for a long time. So no real story there. And dredging up examples from the days prior to the discovery of antibiotics is hardly relevant either. Finally, the indigenous Siberian couple, who ate raw marmot meat; that’s just asking for trouble in the wilds of Siberia.
The real vermin of the Black Death were humans! Black rats were not to blame according to recent research.https://www.pnas.org/content/115/6/1304.abstract
Typical ignoramus of a journalist.
– Rahm Emanuel
This is the next step in the evolution of liberal tactics. Why wait for a serious crisis to actually happen when you can simply imagine the crisis and then use the hysteria and corrupt mainstream media help to do things you think you could not do before. It’s this case, it’s also creates a scapegoat for a problem that, if and when it happens, it will be the result of their failed immigration and social policies.
One. The Plauge Baterium is with us, right now.
Two.the Black Plauge was during a cold snap(LIA).
Three . do not pick up dead rats, squirrels , gophers,etc,
Fleas can migrate to YOU. and if said dead rodent died because of
say, plague, you can be infected . No warming necessary. Ditto
for other diseases . Dirt and fith, not warming is the cause like others have said..
“The steamship caused the last global outbreak of bubonic plague. Climate change could cause the next one.”
Or, perhaps space aliens could. My money’s on space aliens.
Bah, Space Aliens probably created all the outbreaks of bubonic plague.
Los Angeles and San Francisco – a plague on both their cities.
DemocRats are indeed a plague on California now.
They leave out that the mayor of SF refused to allow in the USPS for a long time. He was afraid of the tourists leaving town. This delay allowed the germ to get established in the rural squirrel population. That is why the plague bacillus is endemic on the Western side of the Mississippi River, but not the East.
US Health Service?
Then again, the USPS would not have delivered either, or would shipped them to the wrong address anyway.
Trash is the problem. Not weather.
The alarmists writing this press release propaganda forgot to mention that bubonic plague is endemic to the rats throughout the American West.
Leave trash and feces throughout the cities, one should expect rat, indeed all trash eating rodent populations to boom.
The booms are directly associated with food availability and lack of predators. Those urbanites who kill off natural predators to rats are more to blame than they can ever blame weather.
Lack of predators + food + nesting sites = rat population explosions.
“Longer, hotter weather patterns are extending the breeding season of rats and rodents, leading to a steep increase in their numbers in places like Los Angeles, New York and Houston.
That statement is an outright lie. The common Brown rat female will have as up to four litters per year, regardless of the weather (cold or hot) as long as food and shelter is available. Rats and mice can breed year round. Food is the only limiting factor. Of course before human civilizations came along, they were like all mammals in temperate (cold) climates with cold winters, abundant food simply was not available to support brooding in the winter.
But rural living rats in warm, tropical climates are also population-limited by available food. There is a very well known rat explosion in rural Bangladesh every 40-50 years associated with bamboo flowering, a cycle which greatly amplifies the forest rat population. The resulting hoards of rats from the bamboo forests then, driven by hunger becasue of extremely high numbers, then invade Myanmar and Bangldeshi farm fields and strip the crops bare at night when the farmers are sleeping. This has long historically led to a cycle of human famine timed with the bamboo flowering every 50 years or so.
The UN and EU have commissioned studies to understand this problem and bring control solutions to prevent the rat population explosions.
http://projects.nri.org/bandicoot/docs/bamboo.pdf
This bamboo flowering –> seed production –> rat population explosion –> human crops/farms getting stripped –> human famine and disease cycle is a pattern that has been going on for millenia in Bangladesh, Myanmar, and India. To now blame “climate change” is simply an attempt to avoid accountability for political malpractice.
This phenomenon highlights the problems LA and other cities will have when they finally clean-up the garbage dumps and poor public sanitation associated with the human homeless explosion. The multitude of rats will then get hungry after their food supply is removed, and then invade offices, apartments, and homes in search of new food supplies.
So paradoxically, fixing the original food source problem (the garbage/poor sanitation) that allowed the rat population to explode in the first place, at least temporarily drives the hungry rats into closer contact with humans.
Now the real problem is political incompetence and malpractice by these Democrat-run cities. But then they are aptly named as DemocRats. No wonder they go hand in hand.
Yep. And that is when I quit reading. Know nothing, speaking nothing but their imagination.
I’m surprised they didn’t try to pass off the recent resurgence of Typhus as climate-related.
The article~:
“Longer, hotter weather patterns are extending the breeding season of rats ”
Reality:
“The brown rat can breed throughout the year if conditions are suitable, with a female producing up to five litters a year.”
“Just like the brown / Norway rat, the black rat will mate all year round if the right conditions allow it,”
Wood rats…:
“The reproductive period of this species usually begins in late September and continues until mid-June or mid-July.” i.e it already breeds 11 months of the year…
I fear that Portnoy’s complaint has overrtaken these poor souls and they can no longer see to read…
I’m waiting for the ‘I was just joking and you’re a sea-sponge if you believed me,’ part.
After, of course, they’ve put the message out to millions of people.
I’m waiting on the (Pied Piper) to come and save the day and save the children from these fearmongers.
CC leads to more rats. In a rat’s ass.
The rat problem does not exist in the streets of LA — it exists in the government offices, and the rats there are not of the furry variety but of the intellectually challenged variety.
Too cruel?
Next rat explosion in Bangladesh due in 2057 ( BBC reported on the last rat explosion in 2009. That report did NOT mention global warming/climate change/climate emergency/climate armageddon).
Hopefully by 2057 the climate panic merchants will have been ridiculed into obscurity by totally failed predictions/projections and the 2057 rat reports will have no mention of climate.
I will not be about to see this.
Funny they should print this now when we’re having the coldest winter/spring in recent memory. It’s currently February weather in May here!
As with virtually every other claim of the “effects” of climate change, other factors prove far more significant.
Is it boo-bonic, or bewe-bonic?
Homeless living and shitting in the streets of downtown LA are bring back plague.
I am conflicted.
don’t believe it could happen, but horrified that I may be ambivalent if it did happen.
although would suspect a more “open” sanctuary city to get hit first.
its like the walking dead, don’t want it to happen love to watch it happening.
makes me a bad person.
In medieval Europe, cats were considered to be evil and were killed in large numbers.
Once cats became more tolerated, the multi-century plague pandemic started to run down.
In our modern, heavily regulated (for our own good, of course) societies, we are urged (in some cities, it’s mandatory) to forcibly keep cats indoors, for a variety of reasons that don’t always make sense to me, and certainly don’t to our cat who only comes indoors to eat, or when it gets too cold. Alley cats – the scourge of rats and mice – are getting to be a thing of the past. Again.
More cats in the streets and alleyways = fewer rats
And fewer birds, rabbits, etc and a lot of people hating on stupid cat owners.
Once again, they can’t actually measure any temperature changes, however they assume that there must have been changes, and these changes must have been big enough to make a difference.
So the Sanctuary Cities become sanctuaries for flea-ridden rats.
The LA Times did not actually identify an observable, consistent upward trend in plague cases. Replace “bubonic plague” with any other animal transported disease and the same logic applies. Literally, this fear-mongering propaganda at its worst. The only difference here is that as school children we were terrified by the devastation of the Bubonic Plague, so this article plays on that fear.
Were the US plague epidemics of 1900-04 and 1906-08 caused by ‘climate change’?
Unsanitary living conditions and a subsequent boom in rat populations will probably result in a major outbreak, warmer weather, no. Although it is worth noting that the current increase in homeless populations within certain ‘sanctuary cities’ will provide a prime growth environment for the next major outbreak.