Arizona resident dies from the plague less than 24 hours after showing symptoms
86 comments
·July 12, 2025slicktux
I recall being on a road trip and was at the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains; was getting ready to camp at a random camp site and noticed a sign warning or squirrels that carry bubonic plague via fleas… Scary..
kulahan
It’s not usually very bad. My wife used to do epidemiology in Utah, and the four corner states have a few plague cases every year. Very easy to get from prairie dogs as well. Iirc, prairie dog colonies are separated based on which ones have the plague and which don’t.
atomicnumber3
When you say it's easy to get from prairie dogs, how exactly does that happen? Is it like, you're camping, and a prairie dog gets into your tent? How exactly does that people get exposed to a prairie dog?
317070
It's not the prairie dogs themselves, but the fleas on the dogs. The carriers for the plague are fleas.
__MatrixMan__
I hope that the black footed ferret reintroduction efforts are successful (https://www.fws.gov/project/black-footed-ferret-recovery). There would be a lot less plague out there if so.
Lime disease has a similar relationship with predators that eat mice, so let's also keep an eye out for the owls and snakes.
RandomBacon
I knew someone (in the U.S.) who contracted the plague along with his wife. He survived but his wife did not.
According to him, about one person dies each year from it.
Fire-Dragon-DoL
What improvements do we have to survive against the plague compared to in the past? I'm curious to understand the difference
LarsDu88
Antibiotics. Yersenia pestis is a bacteria that can be killed by most antibiotics
Beijinger
I think the plague has not been an issue since it is very sensitive against penicillin. What is concerning is more the speed from diagnosis to death in this case.
carl_dr
Sadly, it could be as simple as the guy didn’t run up tens of thousands of dollars of healthcare, and left it too late to get treatment.
Waterluvian
Which plague?
lynndotpy
Not stated in the article, but it's pneumonic plague, according to this story from azcentral and this story from CNN: https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-health/20... https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/12/health/plague-death-arizona
Gys
> Plague is a bacterial infection known for killing tens of millions in 14th century Europe. Today, it’s easily treated with antibiotics.
> The bubonic plague is the most common form of the bacterial infection, which spreads naturally among rodents like prairie dogs and rats.
southernplaces7
Nasty thing that. Bubonic plague became famous for killing nearly half the western world in the 14th century in just a few years, but for all its voracious destructiveness, the pneumonic variant left it in the dust in specific situations. I've read that in cities and towns where plague took on its pneumonic form instead of its bubonic variant, 80%+ of the local population would die in just days. In some cities struck by this, populations didn't recover until the 18th century.
southernplaces7
I think it's innately impossible for us now in the comparatively near-sterile, social safety-laden developed world of today to imagine such grotesque death happening so suddenly on such a vast scale.
The COVID pandemic, for all the fear and emergency measures it sparked mostly killed sporadically. In any average social group, family or community, one would hear of only a very small minority of people having actually died. It was, comparatively, a sort of kid-gloves pandemic in terms of pure clinical impact.
Compare that with hearing stories of a vast and utterly mysterious dying sweeping towards all that you know, only to suddenly hear one day of inhabitants in the outermost parts of your city falling like flies in the most disgusting of ways, and then being forced to watch the same thing you'd feared from rumor unfold before your very eyes to those you love, taking each of them in turn so terribly that you can barely bring yourself to even approach (let alone try help) these same people that you'e cherished since birth. This abyss of tragedy overwhelms you and all your senses before finally, just days later, you wake up with yet another exhausting morning to the discovery of nearly every single person you know being dead, and all the social tapestry that wove you together so richly across so many years now completely erased from your personal world. All this monstrous upheaval, in just a single week.
fuckyah
[dead]
tolerance
I was let down by the link to "plague" in the lede being internal. I don't know what I expected, because that's the norm.
At the very least, what I'd like to see from news sites is using a LLM to synthesize the most recent/relevant stories to generate some sort of blurb explaining the topic for a given page.
That is, if a human can't be bothered to do it themselves.
throw310822
Yersinia pestis, the bubonic plague.
mplewis9z
You do know that both pneumonic and bubonic are caused by the same bacterium, right? They’re just different transmission methods.
throw310822
Indeed. I wrongly assumed it would be bubonic as it seems to be the most common form (and because it qualifies a bit the term "plague" which can be perceived as generic, I think).
readthenotes1
You left one variant off, apparently:
"Plague occurs in three forms, bubonic, septicemic and pneumonic, depending on whether the infection hits the lymph nodes, bloodstream or lungs. Most US cases are bubonic, typically spread via flea bites from infected rodents. "
Given the discussion of the prairie dog die off, it's more interesting than it was mnemonic and not move on it for me fleas
littlestymaar
I genuinely don't understand why this comment is downvoted.
carterschonwald
Bubonic
mcv
According to the article, they're all the same plague, but it manifests differently based on which organs it hits.
Apparently there's a couple of cases every year, but I've got to say that amidst the return of measles and various other diseases, the cuts in healthcare, this is not a great look.
Waterluvian
Apparently it’s very easy to treat, if you can and do seek treatment. Which is why the annual deaths are usually rural regions.
rayiner
As of July 2025, the U.S. had about 1,300 measles cases compared to over 2,700 in Canada as of May 2025: https://vaxopedia.org/2025/06/02/the-north-american-measles-.... See also: https://abcnews.go.com/Health/us-measles-cases-hit-highest-n...
Canada obviously had only 1/10th the population. Your attempted connection to domestic policies is spurious.
iJohnDoe
In general, how do you get exposed to it? Hiking? Do people often get that close to prairie dogs? Hiking in Utah?
Animats
There's a vaccine, but it's old and not recommended for the general population.[1]
I can find no news outlet reporting the fact claimed in the headline, that the person died less than 24 hours after showing symptoms.
What is reported, in this article and many others, is that the person arrived at the hospital and died there the same day. There is no mention in any article I have read that the symptoms began less than 24 hours before the death.