When you hear or see the word ‘plague’ it usually draws attention. But since it rarely applies to you or anyone you know, it passes quickly. It’s a ‘long time ago’ thing,’ you think. But, sorry to say, it isn’t.
The Pueblo Department of Public Health and Environment—the health department—recently identified one individual in the county who had contracted the plague. More specifically, bubonic plague.
While Pueblo and state health have confirmed the findings, information on age, gender, location within the county are not being released, only that the victim was diagnosed.
“The ultimate demographic information is that the case took place in Pueblo County,” said County Health Public information Officer, Trysten Garcia, citing HIPAA, patient confidentiality regulations.
How the victim contracted the disease remains under wraps. But, said Garcia, the symptoms, which include chills, fever, severe headaches, muscle aches, nausea, swollen lymph nodes and vomiting, forced the victim to “very quickly” seek medical attention.
While there has been no information on how the Pueblo County victim contracted the disease, the common understanding is that it the result of a fleabite. The insect feeds on the blood of small animals like squirrels, prairie dogs and chipmunks that have been infected. A fleabite to a human continues the chain of the disease. A person may also develop plague if they have direct contact with fluid or tissue from an animal with the disease or one that has died from it.
The Pueblo case, Garcia stated, is only one of only a handful of cases in the state since 2005. But despite its rarity, the plague recently identified in southern Colorado has its own dark history. It is the same nightmarish pestilence that, quite literally, ravaged Europe and other parts of the world in 14th century and beyond.
Once referred to as Black Death because of victim’s blackened tissue due to gangrene, the plague is said to have wiped out as much as 75-200 million people within five years of arriving in 1347. Its genesis is said to be connected to a dozen wool trading ships that docked in the Italian port of Messina after crossing the Black Sea.
When the ships docked an unknown number of their crews were either already dead or dying. Many of their bodies were covered with blood-filled boils with others suffering high fevers. The ships were immediately ordered to leave but it was already too late. The plague docked with the fleet. It was not leaving.
With little more than superstition to go on and zero understanding of germs, the vectors of the infestation, treatments were often only prayer or the most bizarre—truly bizarre—medieval remedies. With no scientific knowledge to understand the disease, many blamed societal immoral- ity or even the alignment of the planets, while many others blamed Jews, a population that in some cases paid with their lives. There was no connection to the rats that carried the bacterium Yersinia pestis which traveled via fleas carried by the infected rodents.
The infestation was unimaginably severe, wiping out or reducing populations of once bustling centers of commerce to, in some cases, zero. Many of these towns remained unoccupied for years because of the fear of recontamination. It would be an estimated 150 years before the population recovered.
But it wasn’t just Europe that suffered. Historians say that the same disease that cursed Europe also landed four-square in China and Africa. As much as half the population of China died from plague during this same period with an eighth of Africa’s population suffering the same fate.
But humans weren’t the only victims of the plague. Animals, including pigs, cows and sheep were also affected. So many sheep died from the plague that for a time there was a shortage of wool across Europe. Dogs, on the other hand, were unbothered thanks to their natural resistance.
The plague, once called ‘a peasant disease,’ was anything but class conscious. Once it began, its victims included Spain’s King Alphonso XI, two archbishops of Canterbury and Joan, the daughter of England’s King Edward III.
This deadly scourge across the land took advantage of a scientific ignorance that had no idea about germs or what they did. As a result, for many, religion became a singular hope for its eradication.
One religious movement made up of monks and their followers and steadfast in their belief that it was God’s curse on humanity traveled from town to town where they carried on a campaign of self-flagellation, whipping themselves and one another while calling on townspeople to repent.
Health officials say there is little chance of a single case of plague spreading beyond where it now stands. But that doesn’t mean the threat does not exist. According to the Centers for Disease Control, each year there are victims, most, if not all, individuals living in the southwest United States. But the numbers usually don’t rise beyond low single digits. However, there are regular outbreaks worldwide, most often in Africa, where victims, including fatalities, can number into the several hundred.
The Pueblo County person whose condition remains unknown was treated with antibiotics, a routine protocol. Most victims, diagnosed and treated in time, survive.
