Plague Kills U.S. Scientist in First Laboratory Case in 50 Years, CDC Says
By
A Chicago scientist died of the plague after becoming the first U.S. researcher to contract the disease in more than 50 years, a government report said.
The man, a 60-year-old university researcher who wasn’t identified in the report, was working with a weakened form of the plague bacterium that was previously thought to be harmless to humans. The case occurred in September 2009 and was described today in a report by the Atlanta-based U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The University of Chicago previously identified the man as Malcolm Casadaban, a professor of molecular genetics and cell biology who worked at the school for three decades.
Centuries after the bubonic plague killed millions of people in medieval Europe, the disease continues to infect more than 2,000 people worldwide each year, according to the World Health Organization in Geneva. Scientists who study the plague use the weakened bacterium, which has never been linked to a human illness and is excluded from the strict safety codes that regulate the study of other deadly germs, the CDC said.
Read the article
No comments:
Post a Comment