(Reuters) – A teenage girl in Oregon has tested positive for bubonic plague, state health officials said on Thursday. The girl was believed to have been infected by a flea bite during a hunting trip earlier this month, according to the Oregon Health Authority’s Public Health Division and the Crook County Public Health Department.
The teen was in an intensive care unit at a hospital in Bend, in central Oregon, health officials said. Her condition was not known.
There were no other known infections in the state from the centuries-old scourge, health officials said.
“Many people think of the plague as a disease of the past, but it’s still very much present in our environment, particularly among wildlife,” said Emilio DeBess, Oregon state public health veterinarian in the Public Health Division.
“Fortunately, plague remains a rare disease, but people need to take appropriate precautions with wildlife and their pets to keep it that way,” he said.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the plague was introduced to the United States in 1900 by rat-infested steamships that had sailed from affected areas, mostly in Asia.
In recent years, less than 10 human plague cases have been reported in the U.S. each year, the agency said.
Early symptoms of plague include high fever, chills, nausea, weakness and swollen lymph nodes in the neck, armpit or groin.
The plague germ that caused the “Black Death” in the 14th century and other ferocious pandemics has stalked humankind far longer than previously known.
A study unveiled on Thursday of DNA from Bronze Age people in Europe and Asia showed the bacterium, Yersinia pestis, afflicted humans as long ago as about 2800 BC, more than 3,000 years earlier than the oldest previous evidence of plague.
The plague has killed untold millions of people over the centuries in pandemic flares that reshaped human society.
“It seems to have started impacting human populations over large geographical scales way earlier than we thought,” said evolutionary geneticist Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen and University of Cambridge.
They studied DNA from the teeth of 101 people from six sites: three in Russia, one in Poland, one in Estonia and one in Armenia. Seven had evidence of Yersinia pestis infection.
The researchers also tracked the timing of a pivotal event in plague evolution, a mutation that made the germ capable of being transmitted by fleas. They found Yersinia pestis with this mutation in a person who died in Armenia in about 951 BC, the most recent of the 101 studied.
The study, published in the journal Cell, showed plague was widespread across Europe and Asia during the Bronze Age. The oldest evidence of infection was found in the DNA of people from about 2782 BC and 2794 BC buried in a mass grave in Bateni, Russia, in Central Asia’s Altai mountains.
Previously, the oldest evidence of plague came from about 540 AD in Germany, Technical University of Denmark geneticist Simon Rasmussen said.
“The Bronze Age plague represents an intermediate state where it had not yet evolved the capabilities to be transmitted by fleas or cause bubonic plague. However, it was still able to cause septicemic and pneumonic plague,” Rasmussen added.
Septicemic plague infection is confined to the blood. In bubonic plague, it infects lymphatic tissue. In pneumonic plague, it spreads to the lungs and can be transmitted person-to-person via droplets.
The germ was spread mainly by such human-to-human contact until a genetic mutation allowed it to survive in fleas’ guts, choking their digestive tract and causing them to bite anything they can, wildly spreading plague.
Yersinia pestis caused two of humankind’s deadliest pandemics: the 6th century Justinian Plague, named for the Byzantine emperor who was sickened but survived, and the 14th century “Black Death.”
(Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Sandra Maler)
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