I know this stuff pops up occasionally, but this part of the story caught my eye.
Quoth CNN:
“in May, a Mongolian couple died from bubonic plague after eating the raw kidney of a marmot”
Those Mongols… they make good rock music though.
Ewwwww! Who eats raw rodent kidneys? Or, cooked for that matter.
Did it ever really leave?
From Wikipedia:
It never has. There are cases every year in the US. It can be treated by antibiotics so it’s not that big a story anymore.
It’s Mongolia’s version of Freshen Up.
From the OP
I was mostly sharing the raw marmot kidney bit. Presumably served with fava bean and a nice Chianti.
Gross me out the back door!
I’m really curious about that case in Chicago…
When I was a kid in San Diego and I’d go to school/church camps out in east county, there’d often be signage all over the place warning people that squirrels carry plague and not to handle them.
So yeah, it never went away.
Chicago is a major transportation hub - infected rodent probably hitched a ride from somewhere else and wound up there. That is, after all, how *Y. pestis *came to North America in the first place.
I would have hypothesized that it was an already infected traveler showing symptoms in Chicago, but the website said it was indicating most likely county of exposure, which means they think someone(s) got *infected *in the Chicago area.
It’s the Black Death, and it’s coming for youuuuu!
Since the bacteria is usually in the fleas (and the fleas on the rats, and the buboes grew all around and around, and the buboes grew all around) it probably wouldn’t have mattered if the kidneys were cooked or not.
It probably started like every other disgusting food worldwide:
Person 1: I dare you to eat that…
Person 2: Hold my beer! (or, in the case of the Mongols, “hold my kumis!”)
People who live in the desert or nearby can be exposed by squirrels, prairie dogs, other rodents. City folk visiting like to coo over those cute little fuzzy-wuzzies, and try to hand feed them junk food.
So, you can catch bubonic plague. Even better, th cute little fuzzy-wuzzies could be rabid.
In my neverending battle with the Gawdforsaken deer mice (creepy alien invaders), we could be exposed to the Hanta virus!
Hanta is fun. You get a little cold, a little cough, then your lungs fill up with blood and you are dead the next day.
All you rodents and wildlife, BACK OFF!
~VOW
Nitpick: Some scholars think that Yersinia pestis (bubonic plague) was not the only, or even the major, pathogen of the 14th-century Black Death. An unidentified (Ebola-like) virus has been proposed as the culprit, as well as the anthrax bacterium, Bacillus anthracis.
“I know this will come as a shock to you, Mr. Goldwyn, but in all history, which has held billions and billions of human beings, not a single one ever had a happy ending.” -Dorothy Parker
Beaver is hunted in southwest Alaska, and parts of it (mainly the tail and paws) are fermented and eaten raw. This accounts for most of the botulism poisoning for that area. From an online article about an outbreak in 2001:
That makes me swear off eating beaver.
Well, fermented beaver, to be sure.
Another marriage ruined by the SDMB.