[HN Gopher] Arizona resident dies from the plague less than 24 h...
___________________________________________________________________
Arizona resident dies from the plague less than 24 hours after
showing symptoms
Author : Anon84
Score : 182 points
Date : 2025-07-12 17:05 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.independent.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.independent.co.uk)
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Which plague?
| carterschonwald wrote:
| Bubonic
| mcv wrote:
| According to the article, they're all the same plague, but it
| manifests differently based on which organs it hits.
|
| Apparently there's a couple of cases every year, but I've got
| to say that amidst the return of measles and various other
| diseases, the cuts in healthcare, this is not a great look.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Apparently it's very easy to treat, if you can and do seek
| treatment. Which is why the annual deaths are usually rural
| regions.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://ruralhospitals.chqpr.org/Map.html
| ginko wrote:
| From the article:
|
| >Symptoms often begin within a week of infection and may
| include fever, chills, swollen lymph nodes, nausea and
| weakness.
|
| If I had symptoms like that I think I'd just stay at home
| and not visit a doctor yet. Certainly not within 24 hours
| of them showing up.
| jll29 wrote:
| Mumps, a common kid's viral disease, has overlapping
| symptoms, so many people might follow a "let's wait and
| see" approach.
|
| Also, medical practitioners may not immediately put on
| their bioharzard protection suite when someone walks in
| with swollen lymph nodes and nausea.
|
| That's why it is important to take news of incidents and
| location of the occurrence into consideration, both as a
| patient and as medical staff.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Mumps is commonly vaccinated against when children are
| very young. It's one of the Ms in the MMR vaccine.
| asyx wrote:
| It's 2025 my guy. Can't count on kids getting vaccinated
| anymore.
| rayiner wrote:
| As of July 2025, the U.S. had about 1,300 measles cases
| compared to over 2,700 in Canada as of May 2025:
| https://vaxopedia.org/2025/06/02/the-north-american-
| measles-.... See also: https://abcnews.go.com/Health/us-
| measles-cases-hit-highest-n...
|
| Canada obviously had only 1/10th the population. Your
| attempted connection to domestic policies is spurious.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I think the statistical anomaly you point out is an
| incredibly worthwhile thing to explore. There's something
| to understand there. But I'm not sure it directly
| supports or refutes any arguments about domestic
| policies, other than perhaps saying that domestic policy
| making does not have a 100% guaranteed desired effect.
|
| There's likely numerous other variables to explore.
| rayiner wrote:
| No, I'm agreeing that it's not about domestic policies.
| That's my point. OP tried to bring domestic cuts to
| Medicaid into the issue to make it sound like the measles
| cases in the U.S. have something to do with that domestic
| policy.
| mcv wrote:
| That's a misrepresentation. I did not claim that the cuts
| to medicaid caused the rise in measles; that would have
| been a silly claim, considering those cuts are being made
| right now, whereas the rise in measles is already
| ongoing.
|
| I'm saying it's part of a pattern. The rise in measles,
| after it was practically eliminated, is obviously caused
| by the rise in anti-vax beliefs. And that plus the other
| factors I mentioned are part of a pattern of carelessness
| and misinformation around public health. All of it put
| together, these are extremely worrisome developments.
| throw310822 wrote:
| Yersinia pestis, the bubonic plague.
| mplewis9z wrote:
| You do know that both pneumonic and bubonic are caused by the
| same bacterium, right? They're just different transmission
| methods.
| throw310822 wrote:
| Indeed. I wrongly assumed it would be bubonic as it seems
| to be the most common form (and because it qualifies a bit
| the term "plague" which can be perceived as generic, I
| think).
| lazide wrote:
| Yes, many types of bacteria can cause 'a plague', but at
| least in the western world, only one was 'The Plague'.
|
| Probably anyway, there is some debate on that. But it's
| pretty likely.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| You left one variant off, apparently:
|
| "Plague occurs in three forms, bubonic, septicemic and
| pneumonic, depending on whether the infection hits the
| lymph nodes, bloodstream or lungs. Most US cases are
| bubonic, typically spread via flea bites from infected
| rodents. "
|
| Given the discussion of the prairie dog die off, it's more
| interesting than it was mnemonic and not move on it for me
| fleas
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Mnemonic Plague
|
| People
|
| Learn
|
| About
|
| Germs
|
| Using
|
| Epidemiology
| marssaxman wrote:
| Many years ago, I knew a family who named the three
| squirrels who regularly visited their back yard
| "Bubonic", "Pneumonic", and "Septicemic". The squirrels
| did not respond to these names, but the family sure did
| find it amusing to use them.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| What a wonderful typo. Death by infected memories.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| This is a solid short story prompt.
| stirfish wrote:
| You might enjoy the movie Pontypool. I describe it as a
| zombie movie about linguistics.
| opello wrote:
| Cue the Fall Out Boy track...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onzL0EM1pKY
| littlestymaar wrote:
| I genuinely don't understand why this comment is downvoted.
| lynndotpy wrote:
| Not stated in the article, but it's pneumonic plague, according
| to this story from azcentral and this story from CNN:
| https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-health/20...
| https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/12/health/plague-death-arizona
| Gys wrote:
| > Plague is a bacterial infection known for killing tens of
| millions in 14th century Europe. Today, it's easily treated
| with antibiotics.
|
| > The bubonic plague is the most common form of the bacterial
| infection, which spreads naturally among rodents like prairie
| dogs and rats.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| Nasty thing that. Bubonic plague became famous for killing
| nearly half the western world in the 14th century in just a
| few years, but for all its voracious destructiveness, the
| pneumonic variant left it in the dust in specific situations.
| I've read that in cities and towns where plague took on its
| pneumonic form instead of its bubonic variant, 80%+ of the
| local population would die in just days. In some cities
| struck by this, populations didn't recover until the 18th
| century.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| I think it's innately impossible for us now in the
| comparatively near-sterile, social safety-laden developed
| world of today to imagine such grotesque death happening so
| suddenly on such a vast scale.
|
| The COVID pandemic, for all the fear and emergency measures
| it sparked mostly killed sporadically. In any average
| social group, family or community, one would hear of only a
| very small minority of people having actually died. It was,
| comparatively, a sort of kid-gloves pandemic in terms of
| pure clinical impact.
|
| Compare that with hearing stories of a vast and utterly
| mysterious dying sweeping towards all that you know, only
| to suddenly hear one day of inhabitants in the outermost
| parts of your city falling like flies in the most
| disgusting of ways, and then being forced to watch the same
| thing you'd feared from rumor unfold before your very eyes
| to those you love, taking each of them in turn so terribly
| that you can barely bring yourself to even approach (let
| alone try help) these same people that you'e cherished
| since birth. This abyss of tragedy overwhelms you and all
| your senses before finally, just days later, you wake up
| with yet another exhausting morning to the discovery of
| nearly every single person you know being dead, and all the
| social tapestry that wove you together so richly across so
| many years now completely erased from your personal world.
| All this monstrous upheaval, in just a single week.
| askonomm wrote:
| You should write a book, if you haven't yet. I'd buy it.
| Love the way you convey emotion with words.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| Now that was a wonderful compliment. Thank you.
| Grosvenor wrote:
| Try Michael Crichtons "The hot zone".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hot_Zone
|
| There's entire chapters of this:
|
| "The author describes the progression of the disease,
| from the initial headache and backache, to the final
| stage in which Monet's internal organs fail and he
| hemorrhages extensively in a waiting room in a Nairobi
| hospital. "
|
| Edit: Richard Preston, not Michael Chrichton. Not sure
| what I was thinking.
| jameshart wrote:
| Richard Preston, not Crichton.
|
| Maybe you're thinking of _The Andromeda Strain_?
| literalAardvark wrote:
| The Hot Zone was an awesome read. Highly recommended.
| harryquach wrote:
| This reinforces my belief that today is the best time in
| human history to live. Yes there is still pain and
| suffering but overall more humans live lives our
| ancestors could not begin to imagine.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| And we know this. We can measure it and reason about it.
| But good times breeds weak people and we're well into the
| phase of people no-longer grokking why vaccines, civil
| government, democracy, floodplain management, etc. need
| to exist.
|
| This social plague is proliferating and I'm not sure we
| really know how to fight it as it takes colleagues,
| friends, family, celebrities we once admired.
| deadbabe wrote:
| You can't fight it, you just endure, and one day you may
| die but hopefully others will carry on in a better world.
| overfeed wrote:
| Same goes for preventative maintenance, handling
| technical debt or any action that keeps negative
| consequences at bay. It's a failure mode that's almost an
| inverse of loss-aversion; some people will start asking
| "Why are we investing in $ACTION, it seems unnecessary as
| nothing bad ever happens"
| pixl97 wrote:
| People don't understand why Chesterton's fence exists
| tyre wrote:
| > good times breeds weak people
|
| This is a silly and regularly disproven trope.
|
| For an extensive and approachable start:
| https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-
| mirage-...
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| Beat me to the punch. That simplistic piece of fantasized
| trope needs to die as soon as possible.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| > But good times breeds weak people
|
| Yea I know a couple of people who watched their families
| and friends get chopped to bits with machetes and lemme
| tell you, they are not stronger for it. I would maybe
| rethink this idea. I suspect ignorance has always
| thrived.
| n3storm wrote:
| Eventhoug JFK Jr
| suzzer99 wrote:
| And yet Americans have never been angrier.
| lazide wrote:
| Eh, people got pretty worked up in the '70's. And WW2.
| And the Cold War. And WW1.
| davidw wrote:
| Tom Nichols has a theory that people are actually just
| kind of bored.
|
| Most of the men involved in this were pretty well off,
| for instance. Big trucks, nice houses.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gretchen_Whitmer_kidnapping
| _pl...
|
| Hardly oppressed people.
| spooky_deep wrote:
| In some ways - particularly health and food security -
| definitely.
|
| Although I wonder if loneliness, stress and lack of
| direction are much bigger problems today.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| >Although I wonder if loneliness, stress and lack of
| direction are much bigger problems today.
|
| I'm pretty sure that abysmal health options, food
| insecurity to the point of famine always being just a
| stone's throw or single bad season away, and grinding
| poverty all created plenty of stress. The vast majority
| of people at the time just had no IG Reels with which to
| vent about their crisis mode for posterity. I just can't
| imagine any random modern person's level of stress being
| somehow worse.
|
| As for lack of direction. Life in those times for a vast
| majority had a simple direction: labor and toil intensely
| until you die of old age/disease in the same place you
| were born, rarely straying more than a few miles from
| those horizons. I'd call today's self-created "lack of
| direction" pretty preferable to that.
| roywiggins wrote:
| > I think it's innately impossible for us now in the
| comparatively near-sterile, social safety-laden developed
| world of today to imagine such grotesque death happening
| so suddenly on such a vast scale
|
| The Black Death was so big that people struggled to
| comprehend it at the time, too.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| Exactly that too. Coupled with them living in almost
| complete darkness about how or why diseases spread, it
| would have been exceptionally terrifying to behold in a
| way that a modern person in the middle of a pandemic
| wouldn't have to face in quite the same way.
| literalAardvark wrote:
| Everyone I know lost someone to COVID. I almost croaked
| twice to it.
|
| Idk where that "small minority" is but it sounds like you
| might not value your friends very highly.
|
| Sure, it wasn't 80%, but still, it's not that isolated
| and I hate this narrative that it was a light cold.
| sokoloff wrote:
| The IFR (infection fatality rate: the chance of dying for
| an individual who contracted COVID) is under 1%.
|
| That's a small minority by any reasonable measure,
| especially in a thread comparing it to the plague.
| literalAardvark wrote:
| One could argue that the plague also has a low kill rate
| these days.
|
| The IFR was only low because we could get all the
| infected to the hospital.
| sokoloff wrote:
| What?! I know hundreds of people who have had it, and
| only one I know went to the hospital. Zero died. I've had
| it three times. Zero hospital visits. One was "bad cold";
| one was "mild cold"; the last was "would have never known
| I had anything if not for a complete loss of smell, which
| made me test".
|
| Where is this place where everyone who gets infected with
| C19 goes to the hospital or seriously risks death?
| literalAardvark wrote:
| Who said everyone? iirc untreated IFR is around 10%
| sokoloff wrote:
| You did: "IFR was only low because we could get _all the
| infected to the hospital_."
| literalAardvark wrote:
| Eh, ESL. I meant the ones who need it, obviously.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I mean I know dozens of people who caught it and nobody
| died. Anecdotes don't mean much.
| literalAardvark wrote:
| Everyone caught it by now, so you know more than that.
|
| Doesn't mean it wasn't deadly during the initial wave.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| I know a couple in Missouri who lost 5 family members
| between his and her side. All obese. I believe 4 of them
| died after the vaccine was available, but they refused to
| take it.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| I'm sorry but you're way off base, or deliberately
| reacting to information that you perceive as having a
| political agenda that it actually doesn't have.
|
| How I value my friends has nothing to do with the death
| toll and mortality rate I saw anecdotally, of nearly
| nobody I know dying from it out of hundreds of people of
| many ages that I knew at the time. Do you imagine that me
| valuing my friendships more or less somehow changes the
| clinical mortality stats for a carefully monitored virus?
| Really?
|
| Also, COVID wasn't a light cold, but for many people, the
| vast majority in fact, its symptoms were moderate to mild
| and far from fatal. Again, this isn't politics of any
| kind talking, it's just the raw numbers from any reliable
| source you care to look at. IFR wasn't anywhere close to
| 10% by the way, as you say further down. Most people, by
| far, with COVID, were never hospitalized for it (that
| would have been impossible considering what percentage of
| the population eventually got it) and the IFR rate among
| them wasn't 10%. I'd truly love to see your source for
| that whopper.
|
| Globally, in absolute averaged total, as far as any
| source I've seen indicates, COVID had/has an IFR that
| roughly breaks down as follows: This is from the National
| Institute of Health btw.
|
| "For 29 countries (24 high-income, 5 others), publicly
| available age-stratified COVID-19 death data and age-
| stratified seroprevalence information were available and
| were included in the primary analysis. The IFRs had a
| median of 0.034% (interquartile range (IQR) 0.013-0.056%)
| for the 0-59 years old population, and 0.095% (IQR
| 0.036-0.119%) for the 0-69 years old. The median IFR was
| 0.0003% at 0-19 years, 0.002% at 20-29 years, 0.011% at
| 30-39 years, 0.035% at 40-49 years, 0.123% at 50-59
| years, and 0.506% at 60-69 years. IFR increases
| approximately 4 times every 10 years. Including data from
| another 9 countries with imputed age distribution of
| COVID-19 deaths yielded median IFR of 0.025-0.032% for
| 0-59 years and 0.063-0.082% for 0-69 years. Meta-
| regression analyses also suggested global IFR of 0.03%
| and 0.07%, respectively in these age groups."
|
| In any case, all of this deviates slightly from a more
| basic point there's simply no comparison between COVID
| and the Black Death, in no scenario or circumstance, and
| mentioning that is not denying that COVID could be
| dangerous. It's just a statement of obvious facts about
| how much, much more horrific one of those two pandemics
| was historically.
| hibikir wrote:
| In the middle ages they understood quarantine, but the
| fact that the disease was carried by fleas made it worse:
| It'd break containment unless the arrival was by boat,
| and you didn't let anyone disembark.
|
| So even when warned (and people were warned) often the
| people bringing the warnings could spread the disease
| anyway.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > Compare that with hearing stories of a vast and utterly
| mysterious dying sweeping towards all that you know, only
| to suddenly hear one day of inhabitants in the outermost
| parts of your city falling like flies in the most
| disgusting of ways, and then being forced to watch the
| same thing you'd feared from rumor unfold before your
| very eyes to those you love, taking each of them in turn
| so terribly that you can barely bring yourself to even
| approach (let alone try help) these same people that
| you'e cherished since birth.
|
| My partner did his medical internship at UCSF in 1994.
| Your quote pretty perfectly describes what happened in
| gay communities in cities like NY and SF in the 80s and
| early 90s due to the AIDS epidemic.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| I can imagine, though in the context you describe, the
| entire terrifying process would have been much slower-
| moving. Months maybe? I'm honestly curious.
| tolerance wrote:
| I was let down by the link to "plague" in the lede being
| internal. I don't know what I expected, because that's the
| norm.
|
| At the very least, what I'd like to see from news sites is
| using a LLM to synthesize the most recent/relevant stories to
| generate some sort of blurb explaining the topic for a given
| page.
|
| That is, if a human can't be bothered to do it themselves.
| slicktux wrote:
| I recall being on a road trip and was at the foothills of the
| Sierra Nevada mountains; was getting ready to camp at a random
| camp site and noticed a sign warning or squirrels that carry
| bubonic plague via fleas... Scary..
| kulahan wrote:
| It's not usually very bad. My wife used to do epidemiology in
| Utah, and the four corner states have a few plague cases every
| year. Very easy to get from prairie dogs as well. Iirc, prairie
| dog colonies are separated based on which ones have the plague
| and which don't.
| ugh123 wrote:
| > Iirc, prairie dog colonies are separated based on which
| ones have the plague and which don't.
|
| Do you mean 'naturally' by their own selection, or some
| external means?
| afiori wrote:
| I read it as someone keeps track of it for public safety
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I hope that the black footed ferret reintroduction efforts
| are successful (https://www.fws.gov/project/black-footed-
| ferret-recovery). There would be a lot less plague out there
| if so.
|
| Lime disease has a similar relationship with predators that
| eat mice, so let's also keep an eye out for the owls and
| snakes.
| atomicnumber3 wrote:
| When you say it's easy to get from prairie dogs, how exactly
| does that happen? Is it like, you're camping, and a prairie
| dog gets into your tent? How exactly does that people get
| exposed to a prairie dog?
| 317070 wrote:
| It's not the prairie dogs themselves, but the fleas on the
| dogs. The carriers for the plague are fleas.
| Animats wrote:
| There's a vaccine, but it's old and not recommended for the
| general population.[1]
|
| [1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00041848.htm
| kulahan wrote:
| There is also a cure if you catch it quick. It's a pretty good
| cure - TFA says it has a survival rate of 90% with treatment.
| apparent wrote:
| Sounds like a great medicine to take, but a 10% death rate
| even when treated is pretty scary.
| RandomBacon wrote:
| I knew someone (in the U.S.) who contracted the plague along with
| his wife. He survived but his wife did not.
|
| According to him, about one person dies each year from it.
| iJohnDoe wrote:
| How did they get exposed?
| fakedang wrote:
| Fleas moving from rats to pets I presume.
| iJohnDoe wrote:
| In general, how do you get exposed to it? Hiking? Do people often
| get that close to prairie dogs? Hiking in Utah?
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Fleas bite you in your sleep
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| What improvements do we have to survive against the plague
| compared to in the past? I'm curious to understand the difference
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| Antibiotics. Yersenia pestis is a bacteria that can be killed
| by most antibiotics
| Beijinger wrote:
| I think the plague has not been an issue since it is very
| sensitive against penicillin. What is concerning is more the
| speed from diagnosis to death in this case.
| carl_dr wrote:
| Sadly, it could be as simple as the guy didn't run up tens of
| thousands of dollars of healthcare, and left it too late to
| get treatment.
| cvoss wrote:
| I can find no news outlet reporting the fact claimed in the
| headline, that the person died less than 24 hours after showing
| symptoms.
|
| What is reported, in this article and many others, is that the
| person arrived at the hospital and died there the same day. There
| is no mention in any article I have read that the symptoms began
| less than 24 hours before the death.
| OJFord wrote:
| This article kind of implies it:
|
| > The victim was rushed to Flagstaff Medical Center, showing
| severe symptoms, and died the same day.
|
| But sure, that doesn't rule out that the symptoms _became_
| severere, or that there weren 't different lesser symptoms
| beforehand. It does make it sound like it was all pretty
| immediate though.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-07-12 23:00 UTC)