Many people think of plague as a disease of the distant past, but this dangerous infection continues to claim lives today. In the last decade alone, about 6,000 cases of infection were recorded worldwide, 582 of which were fatal, according to infohub.kz.
Plague is a bacterial infection caused by Yersinia pestis (the plague pathogen). It usually spreads through the bites of infected fleas or through contact with infected animals.
Which form is the most dangerous
There are three forms of the disease: bubonic, septicemic, and pneumonic. The pneumonic form is considered the most dangerous. It is transmitted from person to person through coughing and, without antibiotics, can kill in just 24 hours. However, with timely treatment, the chances of recovery are high.
According to data from scientific publications in the Journal of Microbiology, Epidemiology and Immunobiology, as well as reports from the World Health Organization, over the past ten years (from 2015 to 2024), about 5,880 cases of human plague were recorded worldwide, of which about 582 were fatal.
Where plague still occurs
The Democratic Republic of the Congo remains one of the main regions with constant incidence: about a thousand cases are reported there annually. Madagascar also regularly experiences seasonal outbreaks. For example, the last major outbreak was recorded there in 2017 — more than 2,000 cases. In the United States, an average of about seven cases are reported annually.
In Kazakhstan, the last case of plague was recorded in 2023. At that time, bubonic plague was identified. The person was infected in nature through flea bites.
The last case of infection was previously reported by Kursiv. It was reported that a 28-year-old female employee of a plague control institute in the Irkutsk region of the Russian Federation died after breaking a test tube. However, later Rospotrebnadzor reported that no cases of plague were detected, and the cause of the woman's death was preliminarily named as pneumonia.