BACKGROUND This qualitative investigation was conducted to determine the socio-epidemiological factors related to the plague outbreak (2002) in Himachal Pradesh (HP), India. METHODS The data for socio-epidemiological factors related to the plague outbreak (2002) in HP was obtained from residents through 150 in-depth Interviews (IDI) and 30 Focus Group Discussions (FGD) during six visits (from...

of Hong Kong healthcare workers to accept pre-pandemic infl uenza vaccination at different WHO alert levels: two questionnaire surveys. Initial response of health care institutions to emergence of H1N1 infl uenza: experiences, obstacles, and perceived future needs. To the Editor: Plague is a deadly rodent-associated fl ea-borne zoono-sis caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis (1). Human plague...

Although several health departments collect coyote blood samples for plague surveillance, the association between reported human cases and coyote seroprevalence rates remains anecdotal. Using data from an endemic region of the United States, we sought to quantify this association. From 1974 to 1998, about 2,276 coyote blood samples from four Arizona counties were tested for serological evidence...

BACKGROUND Landscape may affect the distribution of infectious diseases by influencing the population density and dispersal of hosts and vectors. Plague (Yersinia pestis infection) is a highly virulent, re-emerging disease, the ecology of which has been scarcely studied in Africa. Human seroprevalence data for the major plague focus of Madagascar suggest that plague spreads heterogeneously acro...

BACKGROUND Plague, a Yersinia pestis infection, is a fatal disease with tremendous transmission capacity. However, the mechanism of how the pathogen stays in a reservoir, circulates and then re-emerges is an enigma. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS We studied a plague outbreak caused by the construction of a large reservoir in southwest China followed 16-years' surveillance. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNI...

Immune heterogeneity in wild host populations indicates that disease-mediated selection is common in nature. However, the underlying dynamic feedbacks involving the ecology of disease transmission, evolutionary processes, and their interaction with environmental drivers have proven challenging to characterize. Plague presents an optimal system for interrogating such couplings: Yersinia pestis t...

Plague is a highly virulent fleaborne zoonosis that occurs throughout many parts of the world; most suspected human cases are reported from resource-poor settings in sub-Saharan Africa. During 2008-2016, a combination of active surveillance and laboratory testing in the plague-endemic West Nile region of Uganda yielded 255 suspected human plague cases; approximately one third were laboratory co...

Abstract Plague was a frequent visitor to early modern England, ravishing the whole country six times between 1563 and 1666. The plague problem was, however, definitely not just an English peculiarity. Plague, due its recurrent devastating outbreaks, one of central themes late sixteenth-century medical scholarship social policymaking. regulated mainly at local levels, but most continental regul...

Exposure to cats infected with Yersinia pestis is a recently recognized risk for human plague in the US. Twenty-three cases of cat-associated human plague (5 of which were fatal) occurred in 8 western states from 1977 through 1998, which represent 7.7% of the total 297 cases reported in that period. Bites, scratches, or other contact with infectious materials while handling infected cats result...

BACKGROUND No efficient vaccine against plague is currently available. We previously showed that a genetically attenuated Yersinia pseudotuberculosis producing the Yersinia pestis F1 antigen was an efficient live oral vaccine against pneumonic plague. This candidate vaccine however failed to confer full protection against bubonic plague and did not produce F1 stably. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FIN...