Flea-spread plague kills 40 in Madagascar

JOHANNESBURG -- A plague outbreak has killed 40 people on the island nation of Madagascar, with 119 people diagnosed with the bacterial disease since August.

Two people have been diagnosed and one has died in the capital, Antananarivo. The World Health Organization fears the plague outbreak may spread rapidly through Madagascar's largest and densely populated city, worsened by the country's poor health care system.

"There is now a risk of a rapid spread of the disease due to the city's high population density and the weakness of the health care system," the WHO said.

The WHO said a national task force has been set up to manage the outbreak, with the cost of the project reaching $200,000. The international health organization said it is working with the Red Cross and Madagascan health authorities to control the disease.

The plague is a disease carried by rodents and spread by fleas. Humans are most often infected when they are bitten by fleas, causing swelling of the lymph nodes and sometimes pneumonia.

Combating the disease in Madagascar has been made more difficult by a high level of resistance to an insecticide used to control fleas, according to the WHO. Early treatment and antibiotics have been effective in curing the disease.

The bubonic form of the disease can be treated with antibiotics. The deadlier pneumonic form, which attacks the lungs, may kill patients within 24 hours, warn health officials. Pneumonic plague is easily spread through coughing, but WHO says only 2 percent of cases reported in Madagascar have been from this highly infectious form of the disease.

The first case of the outbreak was found in a village in a district two hours away from Antananarivo. The man was positively diagnosed Aug. 31 and died days later, according to the WHO. Since then, 16 other districts have reported cases of the plague.

The plague, also known as the Black Death, killed an estimated 50 million people during the 14th century, half in Europe and half in Asia and Africa, according to a WHO report. Historic accounts have provided evidence that the plague reached Europe via biological warfare, after the Mongol army catapulted plague-infected cadavers into the besieged Crimean city of Caffa in the mid-1300s.

Seven countries -- Madagascar, Brazil, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burma, Peru, Vietnam and the U.S. -- have been affected by the plague "virtually every year" in the past 44 years, according to the WHO report.

Madagascar was last hit in December, when at least 20 people were infected.

In the U.S., an average of seven human plague cases are reported each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Four cases of the plague were found in Colorado this year, infections that may have been caused by an infected dog.

Information for this article was contributed by Lynsey Chutel of The Associated Press and by Caroline Chen, Niamh Ring and Kelly Gilblom of Bloomberg News.

A Section on 11/23/2014

Upcoming Events