I have read that bubonic plague is endemic among wild rodent populations in 17 Western states. Have any genetic studies ever been done to see what the similarities might be to Asian forms of bubonic plague versus the European varieties? They would probably have to dig up old remains to study the types that existed historically. I also wonder if BP could have been a factor in disappearance of Anasazi and other tribal groups? Any studies of causes of death among the buried?
> Plague is a globally distributed, zoonotic disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. In the late 1890s, rat-infested steamships introduced the disease into the continental United States. The first documented autochthonous human infection occurred in the Chinatown section of San Francisco, California, in March of 1900. Cases were soon reported in other port cities, including New Orleans, Galveston, Seattle, and Los Angeles. Along the Pacific Coast, infection spread from urban rats to native rodent species, and by the 1950s, Y. pestis had spread eastward to reach western portions of the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. This distribution has remained static for >60 years, presumably the result of climatic and ecologic factors that limit further spread. Although poorly defined, these factors may be related to the ecology of vector species rather than that of rodent hosts.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4285253/
"The epidemic of cocoliztli from 1545 to 1548 killed an estimated 5 million to 15 million people, or up to 80% of the native population of Mexico (Figure 1). In absolute and relative terms the 1545 epidemic was one of the worst demographic catastrophes in human history, approaching even the Black Death of bubonic plague, which killed approximately 25 million in western Europe from 1347 to 1351 or about 50% of the regional population.
The cocoliztli epidemic from 1576 to 1578 cocoliztli epidemic killed an additional 2 to 2.5 million people, or about 50% of the remaining native population.