Climate change has increased the risk of the plague spilling over from humans to animals in the western U.S. Valuable insights into how this deadly disease has historically moved and developed in the U.S. can help us understand more about its future.
We want to understand where plague can exist in the United States, how it can exist in different places over the last century, and why plague can exist in certain places.
The Black Death, which killed 25 million people over four years in the 1300s, was caused by the plague, called yersinia pestis. Rats are known to carry plague-infested fleas on them, and this is one of the reasons why the bacteria is spread to humans. Scientists think that the plague will likely increase its spread to humans as the planet warms and people come into closer contact with wild animals.
There isn't a lot of research on what historically are the best conditions for the plague to get out of control. There are a lot of unanswered questions about the plague, like why it hasn't spread to certain geographic areas or why human cases don't always overlap with where animals are carrying the disease.
Modelling how infectious disease might spread with climate change is based on projections of how wildlife habitats could grow and change. This type of modeling oversimplifies disease by overlooking a lot of important details about how plaguebacteria interact with the environment, including things like soil type and elevation, that can help tell better stories about how it spreads from animals to humans.
Colin Carlson said that most of what we know about climate and disease comes from extrapolating the future, but we don't know much about the past.
The study authors were going to get a better understanding of these details. Researchers built a model to look at the relationships between the data points that were used to create the model and how they changed over time. Their results were published in a journal.
The study found that rodents in higher altitudes were up to 40% more likely to be carriers of the disease. The risk of the plague spreading from rodents to humans has increased.
There are a lot of different levers controlling the ecology of the disease. As we start to identify the big ones, we can look at how the key variables have changed since 1950, and it turns out that more and more of this region is starting to match the conditions that allow plague to hang out in animals and make the jump into people.
There is a growing probability that plague will develop because of climate change, but that doesn't mean you need to worry about the second coming of the Black Death. Nowadays, it's treatable with modern antibiotics, but still not something you want to risk a lot of people catching.
When the western US is heating up,Plague is probably low on the things to worry about. If you sleep in a place where you don't get bitten by fleas, then you have taken away the main route by which the disease used to spread to humans.
The research has important ramifications for other types of diseases and an ominous look into our future. The study shows how counting human cases of plague underestimates the amount of plague in the western U.S.
Carlson said that climate change could affect human and animal health. I don't think it's a sure thing that the biggest impacts are going to be from heat and disasters, because they're a bit more complicated biologically The Pandemic is telling us how important diseases are for the world.
