Comment by fc417fc802
21 hours ago
> avoid close contact with prairie dogs or animal carcasses and you'll be fine
I thought at least fleas could transfer it between mammals?
21 hours ago
> 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.