Tri States Public Radio Staff Shots - Health News Thu January
17, 2013 After Years Of Silence, The Plague Can Rise Again
There's no doubt that the plague has staying power. The deadly
bacterium has probably been infecting people for 20,000 years.
And, its genes have hardly changed since it killed nearly half
of Europe's population during The Black Death. Now
microbiologists have evidence that strains of the plague may be
able to reactivate themselves and trigger new outbreaks — even
after lying dormant for decades. That's the conclusion of a
study just published in Emerging Infectious Diseases, which
looked at recent plague outbreaks in Algeria and Libya. In
Algeria, as in many parts of the world, the plague was thought
to be pretty much extinct. But plague cases cropped up there in
2003 and again in 2008. Then in 2009, the disease appeared in
neighboring Libya, after what had been a 25-year hiatus. Some
epidemiologists assumed that the plague bacteria had simply
hopped across the Algerian border into Libya.