An expert on the plague says that the death of a teenage boy in Colorado was likely unavoidable because of how the disease presents itself.

‘You need some kind of indication from patient history that [plague] is what it is,” Dr. Robert Perry, plague researcher with the University of Kentucky, told USA Headline News.  “Septicemic is rare enough and doesn’t have really many more symptoms that anybody would think of going in real soon for that.”

“If he had gone in soon enough, and the doctors had recognized what it was, maybe he would have been OK but after a certain period of time even antibiotics are too late.”

Perry said that the symptoms that would have been presented by Taylor Gaes would have mimicked the flu until the very end.

“There was no reason anyone would have thought it was anything significant, just the flu,” Dr. Perry said.  “Nobody did anything wrong here.  The parents, the kid.”

“It could have been a dozen of viral or bacterial agents,” he continued.  “There aren’t any distinguishing symptoms to say it’s not a flu that you’re going to get over.  And once it progresses to a certain stage, it’s just too late.  It’s essentially the same as pneumonic plague.  The symptoms are pretty common to a bacteria that causes a lung infection.”

“24 to 48 hours after symptoms start to show, it’s too late to treat pneumonic plague.”

Dr. Perry said that because the bacteria went straight into the bloodstream it was classified as “septicemic.”  He said that the other two kinds of plague show earlier symptoms because the bacteria would grow in the skin or lungs before entering the bloodstream.  Once the bacteria enters the bloodstream, it immediately begins to destroy internal organs.

“Septicemic plague is basically bubonic plague that skips the earlier stages,” Dr. Perry said.