Crane Flat Campgrounds were closed from August 10 to August 13, to allow for rodent burrows to be chemically treated for fleas.
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California’s Yosemite National Park has reopened one campground but is closing another to spray for fleas after a Los Angeles girl caught plague there.
Meanwhile on Friday, park officials said they will temporarily close another popular campsite after two squirrels died of plague in the area.
The child had been camping at Crane Flat, which is about 40 miles west of Tuolumne Meadows along Highway 120.
The California Department of Health said despite the confirmation of plague at the campgrounds, the risk to human health remains low and action to treat the campgrounds was taken out of an abundance of caution.
That said, authorities haven’t given any indication yet that dry conditions had anything to do with Friday’s incident.
In an “extremely precautionary public health measure”, park officials will apply flea insecticide to rodent burrows.
In 2013, a counsellor at the Jewish summer Camp Towango, a few kilometres away from Yosemite National Park, was crushed by a tree that crashed onto a campfire. “People can protect themselves from infection by avoiding any contact with wild rodents”. Animal infected with the disease usually are found in the foothills, mountains and sometimes along the coast of California.
Two people have succumbed to plague this year in Colorado, according to health officials there.
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Symptoms include a sudden fever, a severe headache, nausea and chills. The last case of plague associated with exposure in Yosemite National Park was in 1959.
