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Two people in China are being treated for plague, authorities said on Tuesday.
It’s the second time the disease, the same one that caused the historic Black Death, one of the deadliest pandemics in human history, has been detected in the region.
According to CNN, a Mongolian couple died from bubonic plague back in May after eating the raw kidney of a marmot, which is a local folk health remedy.
The two recent patients, from the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia, were diagnosed with pneumonic plague by doctors in the Chinese capital Beijing, according to state media Xinhua. They are now receiving treatment in Beijing’s Chaoyang District, and authorities have implemented preventative control measures.
The Plague, which is caused by bacteria and transmitted through flea bites and infected animals, can develop in three different forms. Bubonic plague causes swollen lymph nodes, while the septicemic plague infects the blood, and pneumonic plague infects the lungs.
The pneumonic plague, which is the one present in these two people in China, is considered more virulent and damaging. If left untreated, it is always fatal, according to the World Health Organization.
There is currently no effective vaccine against plague, but modern antibiotics can prevent complications and death if given quickly enough.
There is a strain of bubonic plague; however, with high-level resistance to the antibiotic streptomycin, which is usually the first-line defense treatment, this strain was found recently in Madagascar.
Untreated bubonic plague can turn into pneumonic plague, which causes rapidly developing pneumonia after bacteria spreads to the lungs.
In the United States, there have been anywhere from a few to a few dozen cases of plague every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2015, two people in Colorado died from the plague, and the year before, there were eight reported cases in the state.
With this bacterial infection having caused close to 50,000 human cases in the past 20 years, the plague is now categorized by the World Health Organization as a re-emerging disease.
