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
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Are these researchers that stupid? A simple kindergarten review of the literature reveals that COLD periods result in die-off.
L.A. is a plague on the rest of the country.
Are ya’all sure this is alarmism or city planning?
Yersinia pestis is just a bacteria and can be cured with common antibiotics.
Medieval scaremongering fail.
So take your choice. Pay the rat catchers or pay the drug companies.
Charles the Muderator, [you’re] the 1 and only
https://www.google.com/search?q=der+herr+der+fliegen+trailer&oq=der+Herr+der+fliegen&aqs=chrome.
Charles the Muderator, [you’re] the 1 and only … and so on.
Thanks, moderation.
Perhaps a little update on the history of plague is in order. Ancient DNA research has greatly changed our understanding of historical epidemics. “What kills you isn’t things you don’t know It’s the things you know that just ain’t so”.
Plague is an old disease – European/Eurasian populations have been decimated by plague epidemics since the Neolithic.
It is of course not by any stretch of the imagination a tropical disease, Norway and Iceland was among the worst affected countries during the late medieval-early modern pandemic
There has been at least four big pandemics, one during the Neolithic (c. 3,000-4,000 BC), one in early medieval times (c. 550-750 AD), the “classic” Black Death (c. 1350-1700 AD), and a smallish one (aborted by improved medical knowledge) c. 1850-1900. Almost certainly more will ultimately be found between the first and second of these.
It is very doubtful if any pandemic before the last one was predominantly spread by rodents, but rather from human to human (though quite likely by fleas). There were simply no rats in most of the affected areas, and early strains of Yersinia pestis don’t seem to have had the adaptations needed for efficient rodent-to-human transmission.
A good recent review:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41435-019-0065-0
Yes, I know – but not everything published in Nature is junk.
I have lived in the ESFBA for the past 35 years and, since I feed birds and squirrels and keep cats, I’ve watched the cycles.
One aspect no one has yet mentioned is that the Cal raccoon population was devastated by a prion disease epidemic about 15 years ago and has yet to recover. Raccoons are major predators of rats in the less-urban parts of cities.
Then there’s the end of the drought, which brought a surge in CA rats and mice (Mus californicus grows to be as large as rats, and is often mistaken for them).
The most urban parts of LA, of course, are less affected by these trends than by street garbage, homeless encampments and other factors noted by other commenters.
We can but hope 🙂