How Not to Get the Plague

Media outlets reported Thursday that a child contracted the plague while camping with family in Yosemite National Park in July. The news came just a day after Colorado’s Pueblo City-County Health Department reported that an adult had died from the same disease. It was the second report of Yersinia pestis, the plague bacterium, infecting a human in Colorado this year.

It’s alarming to hear about these cases in such short order. But it’s still rare for humans to contract the infamous disease. In recent decades, reported cases of the plague in humans have averaged about seven per year in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Though the plague can take a variety of forms, about 80 percent of human cases since the 1900s have been bubonic (yes, the same lymph node-swelling disease that wiped out half of Medieval Europe). It can be deadly if left untreated. Caught early, however, the plague is now curable. (For instance, the child in Yosemite is recovering after receiving a slew of antibiotics, according to NBC.)