[ad_1]
In a remote mountainous area in Kyrgyzstan in 2013, a delusional boy was taken to the hospital by his parents and later died of a plague.
Five days before being taken to hospital in the village of Ichke-Zhergez in the Issyk-Kul region of eastern Kyrgyzstan, the 15-year-old boy killed and flayed a ground squirrel. The plague, the “ghost” of the past, sometimes still appears in remote areas of the former Soviet Union, spread by wild rodents.
Thanks to efforts to improve community sanitation for centuries, the danger level of the plague is no longer as severe and can be treated with antibiotics if treated promptly. However, until the 1920s, plague remained a deadly threat to the Soviet Union, prompting them to establish a system of plague centers to control and prevent the disease.
The legacy of such systems still exists in Russia and in many other former Soviet states. With available epidemic plans and well-trained personnel, these agencies have become the mainstay of the fight against Covid-19 in the region.
Scientists at a Soviet center against the plague in the late 1950s. Photo: NY Times.
“Of course they helped from the beginning,” said Ravshan Maimulov, director of a local Kyrgyz plague agency. The 57-year-old received training at Microbe, Russia’s anti-pest research institute.
Maimulov is in charge of planning rodent sprays to kill insects and slow the spread of animals. He explained that the plague could not be completely suppressed by rodents that reproduce very quickly, destroying them without success.
Maimulov received a 15-year-old plague-infected teenager in 2013 when he was taken to the hospital in the village of Ichke-Zhergez. “At the time of admission, the boy’s body was still drenched in sweat, there was a bump under his armpit and chin,” Maimulov recalled, adding that the case was too late to save his life. The boy died a few hours after being admitted to the hospital.
After his death, Maimulov received the right to impose an immediate blockade, even though the boy’s illness was not fully determined. He informed the Issyk-Kul governor with a password to prevent the news from leaking, preventing villagers from fleeing before the blockade takes effect. The next morning, checkpoints were established, the Ichke-Zhergez village was within the blockade.
The blockade was later issued in 32 villages in the area, with around 700 nurses coming to each home in search of plagued people. The squirrel fur is also collected for destruction. This series of rapid movements helps to stop the disease and the only case is that of 15 years.
Following Maimulov’s recommendation, the Issyk-Kul regional government in March applied a similar block to prevent the spread of nCoV. “We follow the plague action plan,” Maimulov said, adding that the Issyk-Kul region, where some 500,000 people live, registered only three cases of nCoV. Kyrgyzstan reported less than 500 infections and 5 deaths.
Russia maintains 13 anti-bubonic centers, located from the Far East to the Caucasus, with 5 disease research institutes and many field stations. The Microbe Institute initially studied plague, but later spread to other infectious diseases such as cholera, yellow fever, rabbit fever, and anthrax.
Russian authorities in March moved new equipment to a Moscow pest center to expand nCoV testing capacity. As early as January, the directors of the anti-plague centers in countries of the Eurasian Economic Union, including Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, also held talks on Covid-19. A Ukrainian plague research institute is also involved.
According to commentator Andrew Kramer NY TimesThe system inherited by the Soviet Union is one of the reasons why nCoV has spread more slowly in Russia, Ukraine and other post-Soviet states than the United States and Western Europe.
Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Research Center in Moscow, also assessed the “common heritage” of Soviet health, focusing on disease containment, and was effective in fighting Covid-19. .
However, similar to the rest of the world, the number of nCoV infections in post-Soviet countries is also increasing. Russia registered almost 28,000 cases, more than 230 deaths and more than 2,300 recovery cases.
According to some analysts, the legacy of the Soviet era will not work in the long term. Yevgeny Gontmakher, a professor of health in Russia, assessed that the ability of post-Soviet countries to fight the disease gradually decreased, while there was not much progress in treating patients.
“Plague doctors were the elite of 100 years ago, not today,” said Gontmakher.
Anh Ngoc (The O NY Times)
