Lie Down With Dogs, Get Up With Fleas. And Plague | Wired Science | Wired.com: There were only two cases of bubonic plague in humans in the United States last year. They were two people, unidentified except for their ages — 17 and 42 — who lived in the same household in the high desert country of Lake County, Oregon. In August, they both came down with high fevers and hard, lumpy swellings in their groins. The older one, a woman, was very sick, was hospitalized with low pulse and blood pressure, and went into kidney failure.