摘要
Plague is a zoonotic disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis Lehmann and Neumann,1896.Although it is essentially a disease of rodents,plague can also be transmitted to people.Historically,plague has caused mas-sive morbidity and mortality events in human populations,and has recently been classified as a reemerging dis-ease in many parts of the world.This public health threat has led many countries to set up wild and domestic an-imal surveillance programs in an attempt to monitor plague activity that could potentially spill over into human populations.Both China and the USA have plague surveillance programs in place,but the disease dynamics dif-fer in each country.We present data on plague seroprevalence in wildlife and review different approaches for plague surveillance in the 2 countries.The need to better comprehend plague dynamics,combined with the fact that there are still several thousand human plague cases per year,make well-designed wildlife surveillance pro-grams a critical part of both understanding plague risks to humans and preventing disease outbreaks in the future.
