Bubonic plague is endemic in a variety of populations of dry-climate rodents, such as prairie dogs and mice. When these rodents proliferate and people have contact with them, plague cases pop up.
As cripplecreek observed, a few cases a year doesn’t justify much in the way of action. Even if eliminating the wild rodent population of the Southwest was a possibility, it would undoubtedly cause worse problems.
“As cripplecreek observed, a few cases a year doesn’t justify much in the way of action.”
Unfortunately, that is horribly incorrect. Studies of the plague burials of prior plague pandemics has uncovered a startling similarity in the genetic structure of the organism. it turns out that every so often a single gene is altered which then makes the pathogen super virulent in ways not seen in the ordinary garden variety of the plague. Researchers discovered when they artificially alter a single gene to flip the switch, so to speak, the organism takes on all of the characteristics of the super-virulent form which killed one-third of the world’s human population. Knowing this is bound to happen in the wild again, there is now a race on to find a means to eradicate the disease before it can activate the gene which can once again rapidly kill most humans on the Earth in less than a year with the aid of modern transportations networks spanning the Earth in hours.
Fleas....it’s the fleas..(I think)...
Yep, an unusually wet year causes an explosion in the rodent population and those are the years the plague pops up. It has been that way long enough that the Navajo and Hopi both have stories about it passed down from the elders for many generations in Northern AZ, and NM.
I always heard the fleas on rodents and even rabbits carried it, my dad told us not to eat rabbits though some people did after a hard freeze.