Sources & methodology · 05 October 2026
Evidence before alarm.
Plague Desk tracks public reporting about plague. It helps you inspect where a claim comes from, when it was published and whether our source connections are working.
What the map means
Markers represent places explicitly mentioned in relevant article headlines. A marker is not proof of a confirmed infection. Country shading means that a country is mentioned in the selected reporting; grey means no mapped article in that view, not that an area is disease-free.
Locality positions are approximate. Country-level reports use a representative point. Headlines without a clear place remain in the feed without a marker. Country names from publisher names are removed before matching. Conflicting or ambiguous places can remain unassigned.
Research and clearly historical headlines are kept as context and do not create map markers. Where a headline does not establish the date of an event, the report detail explicitly says so. For example, a CDC report published in October 2026 describes an Arizona death in July 2025.
How to read the labels
The Irkutsk brief is an editorial summary reviewed on 5 October 2026, linked to its evidence. Automated news ingestion updates the feed; it does not automatically rewrite that reviewed diagnosis or turn a headline into a confirmed case.
What updates automatically
- News searches: scheduled retrieval every 15 minutes.
- WHO, ECDC and CDC feeds: scheduled retrieval every hour.
- Your open dashboard: checks the saved monitor every 60 seconds and when you return to the tab.
- Source errors: bounded retries with increasing delays, respecting rate-limit responses.
The scheduler runs on the server even when nobody has the site open. A refresh of the page is not a new check of every source. Last collection, individual source checks, original publication dates and first acquisition dates are separate.
Official publications have their own release schedules. Fetching a feed more often cannot make an unreported event appear. Archived reports are retained for up to 90 days, subject to a 2,000-record limit; acquisition history is kept for up to 30 days.
What connection status measures
Response time is the total time for an actual retrieval and validation, measured from our deployment region in Frankfurt. HTTP status records the remote response. A connection is healthy only when the response also parses as the expected content. HTTP 200 with an error page is a failed retrieval.
A rate limit is reported separately from a failed request. On failure, the last valid reports stay available with their original timestamps. A delayed scheduler or overdue source check is shown as such. These checks cannot reveal an authority’s private server health or measure worldwide internet availability.
Connected sources
The four media feeds are searches through Google News, not four independent providers. A worldwide search, an additional search excluding the Russia story and English/Russian Irkutsk searches reduce saturation by one event. They cannot capture every publisher or every language.
WHO’s latest 100 bulletins and the current ECDC and CDC feed windows are checked for relevant plague headlines. Zero matches within those windows do not establish absence of disease. The public Google News RSS format has no availability guarantee; changes or blocks are shown as source failures.
GDELT and Russian health-authority feeds are not listed as connected sources because reliable retrieval was not established during setup. News quoting Russian authorities remains attributed to its publisher.
Clinical figures and reporting periods
WHO Table 9 covers 2025: 183 suspected cases, including 113 reported confirmed, and 31 deaths in six reporting countries. Deaths are not stratified by confirmation. Coverage is incomplete; these are not global incidence estimates. Published 25 September 2026.
The clinical panel was checked on 5 October 2026. It is curated after source verification; automatic headline collection does not recalculate these figures. We have no verified worldwide active-infection total for 2026. Unavailable never means zero.
The separate Mongolia event records one confirmed human case first registered on 20 July 2026, as announced by Mongolia’s National Center for Zoonotic Diseases on 24 July. That announcement supplies no death, recovery or current active count. It is not added to the 2025 totals.
In its 5 October 2026 Irkutsk update, the same authority reports that plague was not confirmed following official inquiries. The Irkutsk brief adds no confirmed plague case or plague death to the clinical figures.
Counting and filtering
News counters refer to indexed articles, publishers, mapped countries or connected feeds. The separately labelled clinical panel uses sourced health figures with explicit reporting periods. News counts do not estimate infections, deaths or personal risk. Articles are deduplicated across searches by normalized link. Different publishers can report the same underlying event and remain separate articles.
Title filters exclude common animal-only and metaphorical uses of plague. They can miss relevant articles or retain an imperfect match. Missing publication dates remain missing; a new retrieval never makes an old article new. Temporal filters use publication dates and do not claim to show when infection occurred.
Attribution and independent support
Articles are represented by headline metadata and links, not republished bodies or photos. WHO, ECDC and CDC retain their respective rights. ECDC material is subject to its intellectual property notice; CDC material to its reuse guidance; WHO material to its terms of use. There is no endorsement or affiliation.
Map geometry uses world-atlas and Natural Earth public-domain boundaries. Boundaries are provided for geographic reference, not a statement on disputed territory.
The support bar displays a public contract address and its network. Copying it does not initiate a transaction. The site’s evidence labels do not change based on token activity.