Can Plague Be Cured Now? Understanding Its Transmission Routes and Symptoms in One Article

Recently, plague cases were confirmed in Bayannur, Inner Mongolia and in Mongolia, and are currently under prevention and control. As for plague, many people are not very familiar with it, and some do not even know such a disease exists. This disease can infect humans, and in severe cases it can lead to death, so can plague now be cured? What are its transmission symptoms and routes?

I. Introduction to plague:

1. Which animals can catch plague?

Plague is a natural focal infectious disease, mainly circulating among rodents. Rats, marmots and others are the natural hosts of Yersinia pestis, and generally wild rats, marmots, wild rabbits, wild cats, wild foxes, wild wolves and other animals may all carry the plague bacterium. Plague is a fulminant infectious disease caused by infection with Yersinia pestis, belongs to the internationally quarantinable infectious diseases, and is also a Class A notifiable infectious disease in China, ranking 1st among the 39 notifiable infectious diseases.

2. Where did plague come from?

Plague (the Black Death) originated in Central Asia. In 1347, when the Mongol army attacked the Black Sea port city of Kaffa (now Feodosia, a city in Ukraine), the plague was introduced, and afterward it was spread to Europe by Asian and European merchants, then first spread from Italy to Western Europe, then to Northern Europe and the Baltic Sea (the sea with the lowest salinity in the world) region and then to Russia and other countries. The earliest record of plague was written down in 1348 by a Florentine named Boccaccio.

II. Can plague be cured now?

Plague cannot yet be cured now, because plague can be transmitted to humans. Plague has a sudden onset, a short course, a high mortality rate, strong contagiousness and rapid spread. In particular, septicemic plague and pneumonic plague, if left untreated, have a case fatality rate of 30%-100%. The incubation period of plague is relatively short, generally 1-6 days, but individual cases can reach 8-9 days.

III. What are the transmission symptoms and routes of plague?

1. Symptoms of plague: The main clinical types include bubonic plague, pneumonic plague and septicemic plague. Other types of plague such as cutaneous plague, intestinal plague and tonsillar plague are relatively rare.

(1) Bubonic plague: The clinical manifestations are mainly high fever, chills, accompanied by nausea and vomiting, headache and pain in the limbs, flushed face, conjunctival congestion, and skin and mucosal bleeding spots. It mostly presents as swelling of the inguinal lymph nodes, axillary lymph nodes and cervical lymph nodes, and develops rapidly, mostly unilateral, with the lymph nodes quickly suppurating and rupturing after one week.

(2) The clinical manifestations of pneumonic plague are mainly sudden onset, chills and high fever, headache and chest pain, rapid breathing, bluish lips, cough, and coughing up mucus or bloody frothy sputum, often leading to death due to heart failure, hemorrhage or shock.

(3) The clinical manifestations of septicemic plague are mainly high fever and chills, unclear consciousness, coma, and then infectious shock, disseminated intravascular coagulation and extensive skin hemorrhage and necrosis.

2. Transmission routes of plague:

(1) The transmission mode of flea bites is rat-flea-human, that is, a flea bites a diseased rat and then bites a human, or a person skins an infected marmot or skins and eats other infected animals. This type of transmission often causes bubonic plague or septicemic plague.

(2) The human-to-human transmission mode, that is, after a healthy person comes into contact with a patient suffering from pneumonic plague, infection occurs through inhalation via the respiratory tract. This mode mainly causes pneumonic plague.

Overall, plague cannot yet be cured now, and we can only rely on strengthening prevention and treatment. Generally, when going out, try to wear long clothes and long pants to reduce flea bites, or minimize exposure to places where pneumonic plague patients appear, so that infection will not occur.