Yersinia pestis: the Natural History of Plague

Abstract

January 2021 Volume 34 Issue 1 e00044-19 Clinical Microbiology Reviews Citation Barbieri R, Signoli M, Chevé D, Costedoat C, Tzortzis S, Aboudharam G, Raoult D, Drancourt M. 2021. Yersinia pestis: the natural history of plague. Clin Microbiol Rev 34:e0004419. https://doi.org/10.1128/CMR.00044-19. Copyright © 2020 American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved. Address correspondence to M. Drancourt, michel.drancourt@univ-amu.fr. Published 9 December 2020 cmr.asm.org 1 Barbieri et al. Clinical Microbiology Reviews the pathogen. In contrast, droplet inhalation after close contact with infected mammals induces primary pneumonic plague. Finally, the rarely reported consumption of contaminated raw meat causes pharyngeal and gastrointestinal plague. Point-of-care diagnosis, early antibiotic treatment, and confinement measures contribute to outbreak control despite residual mortality. Mandatory primary prevention relies on the active surveillance of established plague foci and ectoparasite control. Plague is acknowledged to have infected human populations for at least 5,000 years in Eurasia. Y. pestis genomes recovered from affected archaeological sites have suggested clonal evolution from a common ancestor shared with the closely related enteric pathogen Yersinia pseudotuberculosis and have indicated that ymt gene acquisition during the Bronze Age conferred Y. pestis with ectoparasite transmissibility while maintaining its enteric transmissibility. Three historic pandemics, starting in 541 AD and continuing until today, have been described. At present, the third pandemic has become largely quiescent, with hundreds of human cases being reported mainly in a few impoverished African countries, where zoonotic plague is mostly transmitted to people by rodent-associated flea bites. KEYWORDS Yersinia pestis, epidemiology, lice, paleomicrobiology, plague