The child was visiting the Stanislaus National Forest outside the park and had camped at Yosemite’s Crane Flat campground.
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As reported by Reuters, the child was with his family camping in the park about a month ago when he might have contracted the disease.
A Los Angeles girl is being treated for plague which experts think she may have caught in California’s Yosemite National Park. Persons who contract plague have symptoms like fever, chills, fatigue, swollen and painful lymph nodes. The child, whose identity has not been released, was the only one ill among family members. “Although this is a rare disease, people should protect themselves from infection by avoiding any contact with wild rodents”.
Since 1970, 42 people in California have contracted plague resulting in nine deaths.
The case of plague comes three years after a hantavirus outbreak at Yosemite in 2012. Ground squirrels, prairie dogs, wood rats, chipmunks, deer mice, and voles carried the disease further east, and by the 1950s, Y. pestis had hit the western edges of the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, says one study in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases. Officials believe the person likely was infected by fleas from a dead rodent or another animal.
The disease is generally not transmitted between humans, unless the patient has a lung infection and is coughing.
To avoid exposure, Ostick advises not feeding or getting close to wild rodents, including squirrels. Rodents like rats and mice are known carriers of the fleas that cause the plague itself.
On Tuesday, a Colorado resident died of the plague after contracting the disease from a rodent, fleas or dead animal in a rural area of southwestern Pueblo County. In recent decades, reported cases of the plague in humans have averaged about seven per year in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Protect your pets from fleas and keep them away from wild animals”, she added. In 2014, there were 10 plague cases, and in 2013 and 2012, there were four cases each year.
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The state department of public health is working closely with park officials to discover the source of infection. A 16-year-old Colorado boy died from plague in June after he developed an unusual and hard-to-treat septicemic infection.
