The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said it will begin screening people traveling from Siberia for pneumonic plague after a plague laboratory researcher’s death in far east region. U.S. officials have pushed the Russian government for greater transparency regarding the death.
Erica Schwartz, the head of the CDC, said Wednesday that the risk posed to the United States is currently extremely low.
Although person-to-person transmission of the pneumonic plague hasn’t occurred since the 1920s in the United States, cases of the bacterial infection are still reported each year. A man in Arizona died after being exposed to plague-infected cats last year, and a New Mexico woman died from the disease earlier this year….