Ecology of Yersinia pestis and the Epidemiology of Plague.

This chapter summarizes information about the natural foci of plague in the world. We describe the location, main hosts, and vectors of Yersinia pestis. The ecological features of the hosts and vectors of plague are listed, including predators - birds and mammals and their role in the epizootic.

Spatial distribution patterns of plague hosts: point pattern analysis of the burrows of great gerbils in Kazakhstan.

Aim: The spatial structure of a population can strongly influence the dynamics of infectious diseases, yet rarely is the underlying structure quantified. A case in point is plague, an infectious zoonotic disease caused by the bacterium . Plague dynamics within the Central Asian desert plague focus have been extensively modelled in recent years, but always with strong uniformity assumptions about the distribution of its primary reservoir host, the great gerbil ().

Mapping the distribution of the main host for plague in a complex landscape in Kazakhstan: An object-based approach using SPOT-5 XS, Landsat 7 ETM+, SRTM and multiple Random Forests.

Plague is a zoonotic infectious disease present in great gerbil populations in Kazakhstan. Infectious disease dynamics are influenced by the spatial distribution of the carriers (hosts) of the disease. The great gerbil, the main host in our study area, lives in burrows, which can be recognized on high resolution satellite imagery.

Potential corridors and barriers for plague spread in Central Asia.

Background: Plague (Yersinia pestis infection) is a vector-borne disease which caused millions of human deaths in the Middle Ages. The hosts of plague are mostly rodents, and the disease is spread by the fleas that feed on them. Currently, the disease still circulates amongst sylvatic rodent populations all over the world, including great gerbil (Rhombomys opimus) populations in Central Asia.

Climatically driven synchrony of gerbil populations allows large-scale plague outbreaks.

In central Asia, the great gerbil (Rhombomys opimus) is the main host for the bacterium Yersinia pestis, the cause of bubonic plague. In order to prevent plague outbreaks, monitoring of the great gerbil has been carried out in Kazakhstan since the late 1940s. We use the resulting data to demonstrate that climate forcing synchronizes the dynamics of gerbils over large geographical areas.