Five days before being taken to the hospital in the village of Ichke-Zhergez, in the Issyk-Kul region, eastern Kyrgyzstan, this 15-year-old boy killed and skinned a ground squirrel.
Thanks to centuries of efforts to improve public hygiene, the danger of the plague is no longer too serious, and can be treated with antibiotics if treated promptly.
The successor agencies to the above system still exist in Russia and many other former Soviet countries.
Scientists at a Soviet anti-plague center in the late 1950s. Photo: NY Times.
`Of course they were helpful very early on,` said Ravshan Maimulov, director of a local anti-plague agency in Kyrgyzstan.
Maimulov is in charge of planning insecticide spraying campaigns into rodent burrows, to kill the bugs and slow the spread in animals.
Maimulov was the person who received the 15-year-old boy infected with the plague in 2013 when he was taken to the hospital in the village of Ichke-Zhergez.
After the death, Maimulov was given the authority to impose an immediate blockade plan, although the boy’s illness was not completely determined.
A blockade was then issued in 32 villages in the area, with about 700 nurses going door to door looking for people infected with the plague.
Following Maimulov’s recommendation, the Issyk-Kul regional government in March applied a similar blockade to prevent nCoV from spreading.
Russia still maintains 13 anti-plague centers, located from the Far East to the Caucasus Mountains, along with 5 epidemic research institutes and many field stations.
Russian officials in March transferred new equipment to the plague center in Moscow to expand nCoV testing capabilities.
According to NY Times commentator Andrew Kramer, the system that countries inherited from the Soviet Union is one of the reasons why nCoV spreads more slowly in Russia, Ukraine and other post-Soviet countries compared to the US and Western Europe.
Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Research Center in Moscow, also assessed that the Soviet Union’s `common heritage` in health, focusing on preventing epidemics, has been 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.
According to some analysts, the Soviet-era legacy will have no effect in the long run.
`Plague doctors were the elite of 100 years ago, not today,` Gontmakher said.
Hannah