If you live in the Rocky Mountains try to avoid close contact with prairie dogs or animal carcasses and you'll be fine. If you catch it, get to a hospital quickly and take the antibiotics and you'll probably be fine. If you delay treatment you should use that time to get your affairs in order.
Current thought in the academy is that the flea-rat vector wasn't the dominant vector for the medieval plague "Black Death" mortality event, but human-flea-human. See also 2018 PNAS paper Katharine Dean, Nils Stenseth, Boris Schmid at Oslo. Basically, Northern Eurasian people were really gross, Mongols even moreso, and that provided the vector for a dominant human-flea-human spread. The rat vector, we're missing evidence that should be there: mass rat mortality; fast & huge mortality in areas with few rats; clustering followed human networks, not rodent networks. Also the kind of flea. Check the refs for more details.
The initial infection though, definitely from a central Eurasian rodent, likely a marmot somewhere near Kyrgyzstan.
Thus 'avoid close contact with prairie dogs'. The 'medieval rat/flea'-connection was a problem because rats and humans lived in close vicinity to each others. In colorado, that goes prairie dog->flea->other prarie dog, you'll find them on the animal, in the burrow, and on the carcass, but a flea doesn't hop 5 miles towards from through the desert.
Endemic in Antananarivo (very many deaths per year), not sure about the rest of Madagascar.
If you live in the Rocky Mountains try to avoid close contact with prairie dogs or animal carcasses and you'll be fine. If you catch it, get to a hospital quickly and take the antibiotics and you'll probably be fine. If you delay treatment you should use that time to get your affairs in order.
> avoid close contact with prairie dogs or animal carcasses and you'll be fine
I thought at least fleas could transfer it between mammals?
Current thought in the academy is that the flea-rat vector wasn't the dominant vector for the medieval plague "Black Death" mortality event, but human-flea-human. See also 2018 PNAS paper Katharine Dean, Nils Stenseth, Boris Schmid at Oslo. Basically, Northern Eurasian people were really gross, Mongols even moreso, and that provided the vector for a dominant human-flea-human spread. The rat vector, we're missing evidence that should be there: mass rat mortality; fast & huge mortality in areas with few rats; clustering followed human networks, not rodent networks. Also the kind of flea. Check the refs for more details.
The initial infection though, definitely from a central Eurasian rodent, likely a marmot somewhere near Kyrgyzstan.
Thus 'avoid close contact with prairie dogs'. The 'medieval rat/flea'-connection was a problem because rats and humans lived in close vicinity to each others. In colorado, that goes prairie dog->flea->other prarie dog, you'll find them on the animal, in the burrow, and on the carcass, but a flea doesn't hop 5 miles towards from through the desert.