Hi, I'm Flor Lichten, and you're listening to Science Friday.

Have you heard this news?

New Mexico, man, sick with the plague.

A resident in South Lake Tahoe, California has tested positive for the plague.

The case of plague has been confirmed in a person in Colorado.

What is going on with these cases of plague?

I think of bubonic plague as an illness that lives in my history book, not in my feed.

You know, it appears in that Middle Ages Europe chapter.

25 million people were killed by this horrible bacterial disease carried by fleas.

And then we turn the page.

But in reality, that isn't the end of plague's story. The disease is still around and still making

people sick. So why are we seeing it pop up and how should we be thinking about it? Here to tell us more is

Dr. Viveka Vadevalu, Plague researcher and Director of the Allen School for Global Health

at Washington State University. Vivica, welcome to Science Friday. Thanks, Flora. It's lovely to be here.

Okay, so, you know, I think a lot of people think of plague, bubonic plague as this historical disease that

has come and gone. What should we make of these cases popping up?

Right. So the interesting thing about the bubonic plague is that after these great pandemics that

killed many people in the medieval ages and during what we call the Asian plague, which was really

where we saw a lot of the outbreak also in the Asian area, India, China, etc.

in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and that sort of continued sporadically until probably the 1920s or 30s.

This is when we thought that was the end of plague, right?

But this was really a critical time when actually the organism, the bacteria that causes plague,

...