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For days, the dusty roads of a small town in the most western province of Mongolia were largely deserted.
"After the quarantine [was announced]Sebastian Pique, a US Peace Corps volunteer who lives in the remote mountainous region for two years, told Agence France-Presse that few people, even locals, were in the streets for fear of contracting disease.
The illness that triggered a widespread alarm among the approximately 1,400 residents and visitors to the city and isolated them for six days?
Plague.
The city of Tsagaannuur, located near the border between Mongolia and Russia, has recently been cordoned off following the death of a local couple who contracted the plague by eating raw meat and organs from their homes. an infected marmot, Ariuntuya Ochirpurev, with the World Health Organization in Ulaanbaatar, Narrated The Washington Post.
Some Mongolians believe that eating the uncooked bowels of the rodent is "very good for health," Ochirpurev said.
The husband and wife would have eaten the kidney, gallbladder and stomach of the creature, a type of big squirrel found in the area.
In this case, however, Ochirpurev stated that the raw consumption of the groundhog had resulted in a possibly scary death.
The 38-year-old border worker and his 37-year-old wife died as a result of multi-organ failure caused by septicemia, Ochirpurev said.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, septicemic plague causes "fever, chills, extreme weakness, abdominal pain, shock, and possibly bleeding into the skin and other organs."
The skin of a person and other tissues can also become black and die.
This began late last month when the man had a fever, Ochirpurev said. In less than a week, he was dead and his wife had been hospitalized in the intensive care unit by vomiting blood and suffering severe headache.
She died on May 1 of a toxic shock. That evening, the laboratory's findings confirmed that the couple had plague, leading to the quarantine declaration, Ochirpurev said.
The couple left four children between 9 months and 14 years old.
The decision to impose quarantine was made after officials began to fear that the husband and wife had developed a pneumonic plague, which can quickly be passed on to other people through droplets suspended in the air, said Ochirpurev.
Pneumonic plague is the "most serious form of the disease" and the only type that can be transmitted from person to person, according to the CDC. In the absence of treatment, plague cases have a death rate of 30 to 100%, added the WHO.
A total of 118 people, including residents of the city and health workers suspected of having "close contact" with the couple, were isolated and given preventive antibiotics, Ochirpurev said.
Another 28 people, including several foreign tourists from Switzerland, Sweden, Kazakhstan and South Korea, were quarantined at the border where the man was working, she said. The remainder of the approximately 1,300 residents have been restricted in their movements into and out of the city.
No new cases of plague have been reported, Ochirpurev said the quarantine was lifted Monday. The Minister of Health is still monitoring the situation, she said.
Deaths from plague – a disease transmitted by small rodents and responsible for the destruction of nearly 60% of the European population in Europe nearly 700 years ago and the death of millions of people in China, in Hong Kong and the neighboring port cities at the end of the nineteenth century – are much rarer in modern times because of antibiotics, according to the CDC.
William L. Gosnell, program director at the Faculty of Tropical Medicine, Medical Microbiology and Pharmacology, University of Hawaii, Manoa, however, reported that cases of infection persisted around the world. , including the United States. The post office.
"The bacteria is kept in the wild in these animal populations," said Gosnell, an affiliate of the John A. Burns School of Medicine at the university.
The plague is most often transmitted to humans by fleas infected with biting rodents carrying the bacterium Yersinia pestis, at the origin of the disease.
From 2010 to 2015, more than 3,200 cases have been reported worldwide, including 584 deaths, reported WHO. In recent decades, the United States has had an average of seven cases per year, usually in rural or semi-rural areas, the CDC said.
The most affected areas are northern New Mexico, northern Arizona, southern Colorado, California, southern Oregon, and extreme western Nevada.
Gosnell said he had never heard of anyone who contracted the plague by eating raw rodent meat, but added that "it would not be surprising."
"Whenever you eat something raw, you always have a chance to detect all kinds of different pathogens," he said. "There are so many other zoonotic infections that they could have caught, unfortunately because of the geographical location, it turned out that it was a scourge."
In all of Mongolia, where plague is an endemic disease, the most common source of infection in people is "contact with the groundhog and its consumption," according to a 2011 article in the newspaper Emerging infectious diseases.
In the province where the couple lived, nine cases and three deaths between 1989 and 2010 were reported, Ochirpurev said, but said all the victims had been exposed to marmots.
It was likely that the couple's decision not to cook the rodent before eating their organs made them more likely to get sick, Gosnell said.
"If you have some of these mildly pathogenic bacterial infections, they tend to be somewhat concentrated in the spleen, liver and kidneys," he said. "Very often, the viruses that are in the blood are trapped."
"Thorough cooking" is recommended before eating any type of wild rodent, Gosnell said.
"If you cook, the bacteria is dead, you have no problem," he said. "Some things you do not eat raw."
2019 © The Washington Post
This article was originally published by The Washington Post.
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