Health officials announced this week that a resident of Deschutes County — a rural part of Oregon — was diagnosed with plague, marking the state's first human case in more than eight years. The person was likely infected by their pet cat, who had developed symptoms, according to Deschutes County Health Services. Humans are most commonly exposed to plague from the bites of fleas carrying Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes the disease.
'The hotspot is really the Four Corners region' near the borders of Utah, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico, said David Wagner, director of the Biodefense and Disease Ecology Center at Northern Arizona University’s Pathogen and Microbiome Institute. But 'we still don’t have a good handle of plague persistence in the environment in the western U.S.,” Wagner said. “It’s just so cryptic.
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