Because when you can’t stop human beings from jumping the border from Mexico, how you gonna keep the rats out?
Up in the San Gabriels there are BLM campsites with warning signs not to fuss with rodents, because some are plague carriers.
To eliminate plague you’d either eliminate the rodents, or somehow prevent them from getting close to people.
Eradicated? They elected a plague twice!
We have prairie dogs.
Credit where credit is due:
In the 1850's there was a Plague outbreak in San Fransisco's Chinatown.
It was detected early on by a local physician, who promptly reported it to City Hall, and recommended a rat catching program, quarantine, and general clean up of the area.
The city fathers refused to acknowledge that there was Plague in their fair city. It festered until the problem could no longer be ignored, and finally a cleanup of Chinatown was instituted.
But by then Plague had spread from the rats to the ground squirrel population. Now one can be exposed to the Plague anywhere in the western US.
Feel free to draw parallels to any more recent plagues...
I thought they were talking about leftists.
Never mind. :-)
If we eradicated it there would be protests from leftist tards complaining that we were violating its right to exist, just like when we eradicated Smallpox. For all intents and purposes it was very rare in the US until the horde of invaders from south of the border increased its incidence in the US.
It's the existence of this "animal reservoir" that makes the plague hard, if not impossible, to eradicate, experts say..."Unless we exterminate rodents, [the plague] is always going to be around," Epstein argues...
There was only one plague reservoir before the 19th century, in Central Asia - that's where the plague that devastated Athens (maybe), Constantinople (maybe), and Europe (almost certainly) originated from. Same sort of thing as it is in the U.S., small rodents. Now that it was imported and got out into the prairie dog population, there are two world reservoirs. It's a little lesson in real world epidemiology and it's hooked in pretty well.
You can vaccinate a portion of that population because a portion is all you'll ever get, and hope that over time the susceptible will die out and the immune will shrink the reservoir to nothing. That's likely to take a fair number of generations. Or you can eradicate the entire population of the host. That turns out to be a little harder than it sounds, as the Australians found out with respect to rabbits.
That's why we haven't eradicated it. Try to imagine the outcry if we were to attempt to wipe the prairie dogs out. We hold up major construction projects for insects, for heaven's sake.
Because you can’t. Are you going to kill every single rodent in the country? Good luck with that.
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Because state and local governments want to keep all of the cash flow going to salaries and pensions. County health offices don’t care. That problem, along with flight from big municipal-like regulations and fees against building on private lots in the middle of nowhere (wealthy officials in counties), rodent populations continue to expand rapidly to potentially carry the plague farther and faster.
Why hasn’t the US eradicated the plague?
Cause Obama and Hillary are still alive?
A couple of ways to thin your prairie dog population:
* In dry weather, they’ll climb into 5-gallon buckets for water, if they have a way. Fill buckets half full, and prop a board between the ground and the top of the bucket.
* Baits. Check at the agricultural feed stores. Grain baits should be available in bulk at low cost. Put baits in holes as recommended in the instructions or by feed store clerks.
* Small bore bullets, if you can afford enough of them. .22 LR hollow points are good. .17 caliber is great, if bore cleaning is done often enough. Some of the more accurate and higher velocity air rifles are great for avoiding making much noise.
Rat traps will work for the smaller, striped ground squirrels, but prairie dogs are often to large for such traps and require finishing off by hand (unpleasant).