How Bubonic Plague Has Helped Russia Fight the Coronavirus

How Bubonic Plague Has Helped Russia Fight the Coronavirus

A network of health centers formed by the Soviet Union in the 1920s is providing expertise in quarantines and epidemic response for Covid-19.

Scientists at a Soviet antiplague center in the late 1950s.Credit...James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies/Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey

By Andrew E. Kramer

· April 15, 2020

MOSCOW — In a remote alpine meadow in Kyrgyzstan a few years ago, a teenage boy killed and skinned a marmot. Five days later, his parents carried the sweating, delirious boy to a village hospital where he died of bubonic plague.

Like a ghost from the medieval past, the plague still makes occasional, unwelcome appearances in remote regions of the former Soviet Union, where it survives today in wild rodents.

Over the centuries, with improved public hygiene, the plague declined as a threat. Today, as a bacterial infection, it is treatable with antibiotics, if caught in time.

But the plague was still a lethal menace in the 1920s and also an embarrassment for the Soviet Union, which established a specialized state agency to track and contain it.

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Successors to that agency still exist in Russia and in half a dozen other countries that were once Soviet republics, and, with their ready quarantine plans and trained personnel, they have become a mainstay of the regional response to the coronavirus.

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A tent hospital for plague patients in the Mongolian People’s Republic in 1948. Soviet efforts against the plague included sending scientists to various places for field work, including Mongolia and China.Credit...James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies/Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey

It is too early to tell if the former Soviet antiplague centers, as the sites were called, have made any difference in the coronavirus outbreak, which so far has infected more than 21,000 Russians, killing 170.

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