A person in the US has died from pneumonic plague. It’s not just a disease of history
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A person in Arizona has died from the plague, local health officials reported on Friday.
This marks the first such death in this region in 18 years. But it’s a stark reminder that this historic disease, though rare nowadays, is not just a disease of the past.
So what actually is “plague”? And is it any cause for concern in Australia?
There are 3 types of ‘plague’
The word “plague” is often used to refer to any major disease epidemic or pandemic, or even to other undesirable events, such as a mouse plague. Naturally, the word can evoke fear.
But scientifically speaking, plague is a disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis.
Plague has three main forms: bubonic, septicemic and pneumonic.
Bubonic is the most common and is named after “buboes”, which are the painful, swollen lymph nodes the infection causes. Other symptoms include fever, headache, chills and weakness.
Bubonic plague is typically spread by fleas living on animals such as rats, prairie dogs and marmots. If an infected flea moves from their animal host to bite a human, this can cause an infection.
People can also become infected through handling an animal infected with the disease.
Septicemic plague occurs if bubonic plague is left untreated, or it can occur directly if the disease enters the bloodstream. Septicemic plague causes bleeding into the organs. The name comes from septicemia, which refers to a serious blood infection.
The recent death in the United States was due to a case of pneumonic plague, which is the most severe form. Bubonic plague can in some cases spread to the lungs, where it becomes pneumonic plague. However, pneumonic plague can also spread from person to person via tiny respiratory droplets, in a similar way to COVID. Symptoms are similar to the other forms but also include severe pneumonia.
Some 30–60% of people who contract bubonic plague will die, while the fatality rate can be up to 100% for pneumonic plague if left untreated.
Plague: a potted history
This disease is one of the most important in history. The Plague of Justinian (541–750CE) killed tens of millions of people in the western Mediterranean, heavily impacting the expansion of the Byzantine Empire.
The medieval Black Death (1346–53) was also seismic, killing tens of millions of people and up to half of Europe’s population.
Spread by the growing trade networks of the British empire, the third and most recent plague pandemic spanned the years 1855 until roughly 1960, peaking in the early 1900s. It was responsible for 12 million deaths, primarily in India, and even reached Australia.
It’s believed the bubonic plague was largely behind these pandemics.
Plague in the modern day
First introduced into the US during the third pandemic, plague infects an average of seven people a year in the west of the country, due to being endemic in groundhog and prairie dog populations there. The last major outbreak was 100 years ago.
Deaths are very rare, with 14 deaths in the past 25 years in the US.
Globally, there have been a few thousand cases of plague over the past decade.
The countries with the most cases currently include the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Madagascar and Peru, with cases also occurring in India, central Asia and the US. Cases usually occur in rural and agricultural areas.
Plague can be treated
Plague can easily be treated with common antibiotics, typically a course of 10–14 days, which can include both oral and intravenous antibiotics. But it must be treated quickly.
The recent death is concerning, as it involves the airborne pneumonic form of the disease, the only form that spreads easily from person to person. But there’s no evidence of further spread of the disease within the US at this stage.
As Y. pestis is not found in Australian animals, there is little risk here. Plague has not been reported in Australia in more than a century.
But plague, like many diseases, is influenced by environmental conditions. The risk of climate change causing an expansion in the habitat of animal hosts means public health experts around the world should continue to monitor it closely.
The plague, though often perceived as a disease of history, is still with us and can pose a major health threat if not treated early.
Thomas Jeffries, Senior Lecturer in Microbiology, Western Sydney University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Plant-Based Healthy Cream Cheese
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Cream cheese is a delicious food, and having a plant-based diet isn’t a reason to miss out. Here we have a protein-forward nuts-based cream cheese that we’re sure you’ll love (unless you’re allergic to nuts, in which case, maybe skip this one).
You will need
- 1½ cups raw cashews, soaked in warm water and then drained
- ½ cup water
- ½ cup coconut cream
- Juice of ½ lemon
- 3 tbsp nutritional yeast
- ½ tsp onion powder
- ½ tsp garlic powder
- ½ tsp black pepper
- ½ tsp cayenne pepper
- ¼ tsp MSG, or ½ tsp low-sodium salt
- Optional: ⅓ cup fresh basil
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Blend all of the ingredients until creamy.
2) Optional: leave on the countertop, covered, for 1–2 hours, if you want a more fermented (effectively: cheesy) taste.
3) Refrigerate, ideally overnight, before serving. Serving on bagels is a classic, but you can also enjoy with the Healthy Homemade Flatbreads we made yesterday
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:
- Pistachios vs Cashews – Which is Healthier? ← Pistachios actually won here, but cashews are also great and are better (from a culinary perspective) for making cream cheese
- Why You Should Diversify Your Nuts!
- Our Top 5 Spices: How Much Is Enough For Benefits?
Take care!
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Infections Here, Infections There…
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This week in health news, let’s take a look at infections outside and in, and how to walk away from it all (in a good way):
The bird that flu away
This one cannot be described as good news. Basically, bird flu is now already epidemic amongst cows in the US, with 845 herds (not 845 cows; 845 herds) testing positive across 16 states. The US Department of Agriculture earlier this month announced a federal order to test milk nationwide. Researchers welcomed the news, but said it should have happened months ago—before the virus was so entrenched. It currently has a fatality rate of 2–5% in cows; we don’t have enough data to reasonably talk about its fatality rate in humans—yet.
❝It’s disheartening to see so many of the same failures that emerged during the COVID-19 crisis re-emerge❞
~ Tom Bollyky, director of the Global Health Program at the Council on Foreign Relations
Read in full: How America lost control of the bird flu, setting the stage for another pandemic
Related: Cows’ Milk, Bird Flu, & You
Alzheimer’s from the gut upwards
Alzheimer’s is generally thought of as being a purely brain thing, but there’s a link between a [specific] chronic gut infection, and the development of Alzheimer’s disease. This infection is called human cytomegalovirus, or HCMV for short, and usually we’ve all been exposed to it by young adulthood. However, for some people, it lingers in an active state in the gut, wherefrom it may travel to the brain via the vagus nerve “gut-brain highway”. And once there, well, you can guess the rest:
Read in full: The surprising role of gut infection in Alzheimer’s disease
Related: How To Reduce Your Alzheimer’s Risk
Walking back to happiness
Analyzing data from 96,138 adults around the world, showed that more steps meant less depression for participants.
You may be thinking “well yes, depressed people walk less”, but more specifically, increases in activity showed increases in anti-depressive benefits, with even small incremental increases showing correspondingly incremental benefits. Specifically, each additional 1,000 steps per day corresponded to a 9% reduction in depression:
Read in full: Higher daily step counts associated with fewer depressive symptoms
Related: Walking… Better.
Take care!
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Did You Believe These Skincare Myths?
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Dr. Michelle Wong gives us the insider knowledge:
If you scratch the surface…
Here are some popular myths that just aren’t true, and their continued prevalence has more to do with cognitive biases than anything else:
- “Chemical sunscreens need time to activate”: both chemical and mineral sunscreens start blocking UV immediately after application, and the recommendation to apply them 20–30 minutes before sun exposure mainly exists so the product can dry and thus not get accidentally wiped off.
- “You should avoid layering products under chemical sunscreen”: there’s no special requirement to use fewer products under chemical sunscreen compared with mineral sunscreen.
- “Ingredient percentages tell you how effective a product is”: the listed percentage of an ingredient (such as 2% niacinamide) doesn’t guarantee performance because stability, formulation, packaging, and delivery systems determine how much actually reaches your skin.
- “Peeling gels remove large amounts of dead skin”: the solid mass formed when rubbing peeling gels are in large part the product itself reacting with oils on your skin rather than quite that much skin being removed.
- “Hyaluronic acid can hold 1,000 times its weight in water”: there’s no reliable evidence supporting this claim, and experimental analysis suggests hyaluronic acid binds roughly 40–85% of its weight in water instead.
- “Hyaluronic acid dries out your skin if you don’t use a moisturizer on top”: humectants like hyaluronic acid don’t pull water out of your skin, because hydrogen bonds only work at extremely short distances.
- “Hyaluronic acid must be applied to damp skin to work properly”: serums and moisturizers already contain large amounts of water, so applying them to damp skin doesn’t significantly change hydration results.
For more on each of these, plus a short discussion of the cognitive biases involved, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like:
Skincare “Scams” That Are Actually Very Recommendable
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Bread & Weight Gain/Loss: What’s The Truth?
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It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!
In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!
No question/request too big or small 😎
❝Every now and again I try quitting bread to lose some weight and it works, but it always seems to come back and then I eat bread again anyway. Is there a way to break out of this cycle?❞
Yes! You can break out of that cycle by simply enjoying bread in moderation without quitting (and then you will certainly not be in the cycle of quitting it and restarting it).
However, to give an answer that’s probably more in the spirit of your question:
Firstly, know that a lot of the short-term benefits of quitting bread are unrelated to fat loss. We’ve covered this part before, and in few words:
Cutting bread for 30 days can lead to weight loss for some people, but the initial change is often more a matter of reduced water retention and bloating rather than immediate fat loss. In particular, it’s common for people feel lighter within the first week or so because reducing fermentable carbohydrates can decrease gas production and resultant digestive discomfort, especially in those with sensitive guts.
You can read more about this, here: Does Quitting Bread For 30 Days Trigger Weight Loss?
Next, understand that oftentimes the issue is not the bread, so much as the glycemic index thereof, and this can vary wildly from one bread to another.
We wrote about this, here: Is Flour As Bad As Sugar?
And more broadly, here: Grains: Bread Of Life, Or Cereal Killer?
Lastly (for today), there’s some recent science that indicates the issue with bread is actually in your non-bread dietary components.
Researchers (Dr. Miona Marutani et al.) found that mice given access to carbohydrate-heavy foods like bread, rice, and wheat strongly preferred them over standard mouse food and gained body fat despite eating roughly the same number of calories.
In other words, the body fat gain wasn’t about eating more bread; it was about eating less of the other food!
You can read the paper itself, here: Wheat Flour Intake Promotes Weight Gain and Metabolic Changes in Mice
Now, this was a mouse study and may or may not be replicated in humans, but it at the very least presents us with an important reminder of the value of positive dieting, that is to say, worrying less about what to exclude from our diets, and more about what to include, to ensure we get good, diverse, nutrient coverage.
Yes, even if your goal is fat loss, making conscious choices about what to include, rather than what to exclude, can help a lot.
For more on that, enjoy: Intuitive Eating Might Not Be What You Think
Want to enjoy bread, healthily?
As we’ve said, moderation is key, as we as a focus on making sure to include plenty of good nutrients.
There are several ways to do this, including:
- A healthy sandwich with lots of nutritious things inside!
- Healthy things on toast (avocado toast is a great example)
- Soup with bread (just make sure there’s plenty of healthy stuff in the soup!)
Another approach (which can be done in tandem with the above) is to make healthier, non-wheat bread, for example:
- “4-Ingredient 10-Minute Bread” That’s High-Protein, High-Fiber, Gluten-Free
- Healthy Homemade Flatbreads ← a different healthy bread recipe of ours
- Delicious Quinoa Avocado Bread ← another one, also in text
Enjoy!
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Huntington’s Disease Successfully Treated For First Time!
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
…and other items from this week’s health news:
Good news for those affected by Huntington’s Disease
Huntington’s disease is hereditary, and so determinably so that it’s often used in high school biology as an easy example of using a punnet square to determine inheritance; if one parent has the gene, you have a 50% chance of having it too. Symptoms usually show up in early adulthood, and once symptoms do appear, life expectancy is 15–20 years.
Because of increasing problems with muscle coordination (including autonomic functions like respiration and circulation) and cognitive decline, the top three Huntington’s-related causes of death currently are:
- Pneumonia (more likely to accidentally inhale food/drink and can’t clear the lungs adequately)
- Heart disease (heart not pumping correctly, and vascular tone is not great either)
- Suicide (brain not doing well, and also quality of life is increasingly poor)
This new treatment developed by Dr. Sarah Tabrizi et al. is a single-dose gene therapy; a modified virus inserts DNA into neurons, which then produce microRNA to silence the faulty Huntington gene, reducing toxic protein levels.
In the first trials (n=29), three-year data is showing major slowing of symptoms and reduced brain cell loss, confirmed by lower neurofilament levels in spinal fluid, and a 75% reduction in disease progression after gene therapy, meaning that while it’s not a complete cure, degeneration that would normally take a certain amount of time will now take 4x as long.
In practical terms, if we remember that the life expectancy without treatment is 15–20 years, multiplying that by 4 makes a huge difference, given that symptoms usually show up in one’s 20s or 30s, as it moves the prognosis of Huntington’s-related death from age 35–50 or so, to to age 80–100 or so. In other words, it restores normal lifespan, and greatly improves quality of life along the way.
Indeed, some patients in the study have now returned to work, and/or left wheelchairs behind them, such has been their recovery.
Read in full: Huntington’s disease successfully treated for first time
Related: Genetic Testing: Health Benefits & Methods
Good news for those affected by Multiple Sclerosis
This is also huge, and surprisingly easy, and a lot more accessible than the gene therapy in the previous story.
While scientists are still not really sure what actually causes MS or how it happens, they do know it has to do with neuronal demyelination, or “the protective sheathes around your neurons get degraded”—the biological equivalent of electrical wires getting stripped of the plastic coating, and thus short-circuiting or getting broken.
This new study found that pairing the diabetes drug metformin with the antihistamine clemastine shows potential to repair myelin damage in MS.
How it works: clemastine reactivates myelin repair, while metformin appears to enhance that effect. Together, they may protect against progressive nerve damage, though (alas) dead nerves cannot be regenerated this way.
Because nerves are famously tricky for the body to repair even with help, benefits may take longer than six months to appear. Side effects in the trial included fatigue from clemastine and diarrhea from metformin, so there are drawbacks too.
Read in full: “Exciting” clinical results provide hope for a new class of MS therapy
Related: Five Advance Warnings of Multiple Sclerosis
Good news for those affected by psoriasis
Ok, so this one’s arguably perhaps not as life-changing as the other two, but we’re continuing the good news streak here, and let’s face it, psoriasis isn’t fun and doesn’t tend to enrich life, so if its symptoms can be reduced by 75%, so much the better!
We’ll keep this one short: the Mediterranean diet is great for many things, and this is one more. In this study, 47.4% on the Mediterranean diet achieved 75% symptom reduction, versus 0% in the control group, with benefits independent of weight loss. So this one’s quite clear indeed.
How it works: the improvements are attributed to the diet’s anti-inflammatory and cardiometabolic properties, which we’ve written about before at 10almonds.
So, this one’s not surprising, but it certainly is good news:
Read in full: Mediterranean diet leads to 75% symptom reduction in patients with mild to moderate psoriasis
Related: Four Ways To Upgrade The Mediterranean
Take care!
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The Mediterranean Diet: What Is It Good For?
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
More to the point: what isn’t it good for?
- It’s been found to reduce all-cause mortality, which is about the best thing one can say of any diet.
- It’s especially good for heart health and against cancer.
- It’s particularly recommended for the prevention or management of diabetes.
- It’s also been found, societally, to reduce general healthcare costs—basically, people get sick less and so have fewer healthcare costs.
What brought it to the attention of the world’s scientific community?
Back in the 1950s, physiologist Ancel Keys wondered why poor people in Italian villages were healthier than wealthy New Yorkers. Upon undertaking studies, he narrowed it down to the Mediterranean diet—something he’d then take on as a public health cause for the rest of his career.
Keys himself lived to the ripe old age of 100, by the way.
When we say “Mediterranean Diet”, what image comes to mind?
We’re willing to bet that tomatoes feature (great source of lycopene, by the way), but what else?
- Salads, perhaps? Vegetables, olives? Olive oil, yea or nay?
- Bread? Pasta? Prosciutto, salami? Cheese?
- Pizza but only if it’s Romana style, not Chicago?
- Pan-seared liver, with some fava beans and a nice Chianti?
In reality, the diet is based on what was historically eaten specifically by Italian peasants. If the word “peasants” conjures an image of medieval paupers in smocks and cowls, and that’s not necessarily wrong, further back historically… but the relevant part here is that they were people who lived and worked in the countryside.
They didn’t have money for meat, which was expensive, nor the industrial setting for refined grain products to be affordable. They didn’t have big monocrops either, which meant no canola oil, for example… Olives produce much more easily extractable oil per plant, so olive oil was easier to get. Nor, of course, did they have the money (or infrastructure) for much in the way of imports.
So what foods are part of “the” Mediterranean Diet?
- Fruits. These would be fruits grown locally, but no need to sweat that, dietwise. It’s hard to go wrong with fruit.
- Tomatoes yes. So many tomatoes. (Knowledge is knowing tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad)
- Non-starchy vegetables (e.g. eggplant yes, potatoes no)
- Greens (spinach, kale, lettuce, all those sorts of things)
- Beans and other legumes (whatever was grown nearby)
- Whole grain products in moderation (wholegrain bread, wholewheat pasta)
- Olives and olive oil. Special category, single largest source of fat in the Mediterranean diet, but don’t overdo it.
- Dairy products in moderation (usually hard cheeses, as these keep well)
- Fish, in moderation. Typically grilled, baked, steamed even. Not fried.
- Other meats as a rarer luxury in considerable moderation. There’s more than one reason prosciutto is so thinly sliced!
Want to super-power this already super diet?
Try: A Pesco-Mediterranean Diet With Intermittent Fasting: JACC Review Topic of the Week
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