yersinia pestis

I have a post up today at the Scientific American Guest blog, discussing how an earthquake and denial led to prairie dog plague. It details an outbreak of plague in Victorian San Francisco--the first time plague hit the United States--and the many downstream consequences of that outbreak (which began in 1900 and wasn't really contained until 1908). While the story is over at SciAm, here I wanted to talk more about why the outbreak became such a public health disaster. The outbreak was first recognized by Dr. Joseph Kinyoun, a bacteriologist who had been, until his transfer to San Francisco,…

Just...wow. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZy6XilXDZQ

Despite its reputation as a scourge of antiquity, Yersinia pestis--the bacterium that causes bubonic plague--still causes thousands of human illnesses every year. In modern times, most of these occur in Africa, and to a lesser extent in Asia, though we have a handful of cases each year in the U.S as well. When Y. pestis was first confirmed as the cause of bubonic plague during an 1894 outbreak in Hong Kong, most people assumed that we also now knew the cause of the 14th-century Black Death, and the later plague outbreaks that resurfaced periodically. However, there has been lingering…

This is the eighth of 16 student posts, guest-authored by Michelle Formanek.  For many of us in the scientific world, particularly budding infectious disease epidemiologists like myself, the Plague (or, more dramatically, the “Black Death”) is a prime example of the rapid and devastating spread of an infectious disease. So devastating, in fact, that it wiped out nearly one-third of the population in Europe in the mid-1300’s. That’s roughly equal to 25 million people. It then persisted and has caused various outbreaks throughout history, most notably the Great Plague of London in which 1 in 5…

At the new blog Puff the Mutant Dragon, there's a great pair of posts looking at the history of plague, with a focus on outbreaks that have occurred here in the US. Bubonic Plague in America, Part I: LA Outbreak Bubonic Plague in America, Part II: Undercover Science I'll also link them in my Black Plague series.