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The Black Death is here to stay

By Peter Curson - posted Friday, 17 July 2020


But Plague is much more than this.

In the Western USA, for example, plague has been present for more than 100 years and has established permanent reservoirs among ground living rodents which have proved impossible to remove. Every year a few cases of human Plague are reported in Arizona, Colorado, Oregon, Nevada, New Mexico and California and have been shown to spread from a wide variety of animals including rats, deer mice, rabbits, prairie dogs and foxes.

But apart from Bubonic Plague spread by animals and fleas there is another form of plague that is even more deadly – Pneumonic Plague. Pneumonic Plague is the most severe form of plague spread by the inhalation of infected droplets from an infected person. The Pneumonic Plague epidemic that broke out in Manchuria in 1910-1911 remains the most severe outbreak our world has experienced although cases of pneumonic plague still present themselves. In Manchuria possibly 60,000 people died from Pneumonic Plague in 1910-11. Pneumonic Plague remains the deadliest of all Plagues and without immediate treatment is invariably fatal.

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In Australia are we under any threat from the Plague today?

Well given an increasingly mobile world where tens of millions of people cross international borders by air every month there is always the threat of an infected person carrying the disease back to Australia. More significantly however, perhaps Plague never disappeared from Australia after the 1900-25 pandemic but simply retreated back into a natural reservoir of an Australian animal host.

But what evidence exists that Plague infiltrated Australian wildlife in 1900-25?

Well, in 1902 during the human pandemic in Sydney a large number of native animals in the Zoological Gardens died from Plague and over the next five years Plague wrecked havoc among native rodents along the Clarence River as well as among native rats in the Mossman District near Port Douglas. This is exactly what happened in the USA between 1900 and 1920 after which Plague permanently established itself among a variety of ground-living animals. Could this have also happened in Australia? We do not really know and to the best of the author's knowledge rural native animals in Eastern Australia have never been tested for Plague.

There is little doubt that a large Plague outbreak in our world or in Australia would place extraordinary pressure on health-care resources and create scenes of considerable fear and panic. But are we really safe?

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About the Author

Peter Curson is Emeritus Professor of Population and Health in the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at Macquarie University.

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