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A person in Arizona recently died of pneumonic plague—a rare and severe form of the disease. An expert explains how the bacteria that spurred the Black Death centuries ago continues to claim lives

Plague is often associated with Medieval history and the centuries-old Black Death epidemic, but a recent death in northern Arizona is a troublesome reminder of the flea-borne disease’s lingering hold in parts of the world, including the U.S. Local health officials in Arizona’s Coconino County, which includes the city of Flagstaff, confirmed late last week that a person there had died of pneumonic plague—a severe lung infection caused by Yersinia pestis, the bacterium behind the illness.

Human infections and fatalities from plague are relatively rare in the U.S.; according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, seven human cases are reported annually on average. Prior to the Arizona case, the most recent death was reported in 2021. Y. pestis arrived in port cities in the U.S. around 1900 and has since become endemic to rats and other rodents in western U.S. states, including New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, California, Oregon, and Nevada.

“From a public health standpoint in the U.S., it’s a scary thing that it’s plague, and it’s tragic that that this was a fatal case, but people need to remember that it’s extremely rare,” says David Wagner, executive director of the Pathogen and Microbiome Institute at Northern Arizona University, who has studied plague for more than 25 years. “Not to be flippant, but it’s more important that you put your seat belt on going to the grocery store than it is to worry about plague in the western U.S.”

Scientific American spoke with Wagner about plague’s signs and symptoms, and its persistence across time.

[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]

How do people get sick with plague?

Plague is caused by the bacterium Y. pestis and is really a disease of rodents and their fleas. You have an infected rodent; a flea feeds on the blood of that rodent, and it picks up some Y. pestis. Then, when the flea feeds on another rodent, it can pass along the Y. pestis. It’s constantly cycling back and forth between rodents and fleas in nature; that’s how it’s been maintained for thousands of years in the environment around the world.

What’s the difference between bubonic and pneumonic plague?

People call it the Black Death; they call it bubonic plague; they call it pneumonic plague—it’s all the same disease, just different clinical manifestations. What stands apart [with the recent case is] that it’s pneumonic plague. That’s kind of rare, especially in the U.S.

Pretty much all human cases, with a few exceptions, are acquired from the environment—from the bite of an infected flea. If there isn’t a rodent host for that flea to feed on, it will look for other mammals to feed on. And if humans happen to be in proximity, it will feed on humans and can transmit Y. pestis.

If the immune system doesn’t stop Y. pestis at the source of the flea bite, it will migrate through your lymphatic system to your closest major lymph node. So let’s say I was bit on my wrist; then the bacteria would go to that lymph node in my underarm and start to reproduce there. And that mass swelling, that swollen lymph node, is called a bubo—that’s why it’s called bubonic plague. These days, it’s a dead end because there’s not flea-borne transmission from one human to another. It just stops there with the treatment or death of that individual.

What people might not know is that plague has been endemic throughout the western U.S. in rodent populations for more than 100 years.

Left untreated, though, bubonic plague can get down into your lungs via the bloodstream. That’s called secondary pneumonic plague. Those individuals, then, via cough or direct contact, can spread plague person-to-person, and that’s called primary pneumonic plague.

Someone could also get pneumonic plague from an animal—for example, if they were handling an infected animal and that animal coughed. Sometimes hunters in Central Asia will kill [infected] ground squirrels, and when they’re skinning them can inhale particles. People also talk about septicemic plague, and that means it’s gotten into your bloodstream, and that typically also arises from bubonic plague. You could also get [septicemic plague] directly if you had cuts on your hands and were handling rodents without gloves.

Can pets get infected or transmit plague to humans?

Pets, especially free-roaming ones, may come into contact with dead rodents that have died of plague. Fleas can hop onto pets, which then bring them into the home. This is pretty rare because there are so few [human] cases in the U.S., but that is something we think about.

Flea and tick collars are a good idea. If animals do get sick, most of the evidence shows that dogs fight off the infection and can create antibodies against Y. pestis. Cats are more susceptible and can quickly become sick and actually can progress to pneumonic plague. It’s super, super rare, but that’s a possible way for humans to be exposed to pneumonic plague.

What are the symptoms and treatment?

With bubonic plague, typically people develop a fever, headache, chills and fatigue, and then they’ll get those swollen lymph nodes called buboes. It typically takes a few days to manifest because it sort of starts off in stealthy mode inside the body to try and avoid the immune system.

Plague is easily treated with many different types of antibiotics, as long as it’s caught in time. If untreated, bubonic plague mortality rates may be somewhere between 30 to 60 percent, depending on the situation. Pneumonic plague, left untreated, is almost always fatal. So diagnostics become really important. The challenge is that many physicians in the U.S. have never seen plague. The symptoms are a bit common to other things, so rapid testing in the lab can help.

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Wall Street Journal chief economics correspondent Nick Timiraos quickly saw the flaw in President Donald Trump’s Wednesday rant against Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s refusal to lower interest rates.

“Housing in our Country is lagging because Jerome ‘Too Late’ Powell refuses to lower Interest Rates,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social. “… Our rate should be three points lower than they are, saving us $1 trillion per year (as a country). This stubborn guy at the Fed just doesn’t get it — Never did, and never will. The Board should act, but they don’t have the courage to do so!”

Timiraos pointed out a glaring fact regarding the likelihood of interest expenses falling by $1 trillion per year.

“The U.S. spent $1.1 trillion on interest expenses in 2024, and so there’s almost no way this claim is remotely true,” said Timiraos on X.

Timiraos went on to post that Trump’s own Council of Economic Advisers chair last year voiced concerns that lower mortgage rates might stoke housing costs, including rent, mortgages, property taxes, and utilities.

“Okay, but what happens if lower mortgage rates start pushing home prices and rents back up?” CEA Chair Stephen Miran posted in January 2024.

Timiraos did not leave his comment hanging on X without follow-up, however. When a critic claiming to be a “macro investor” argued that interest expenses “would fall by $1 trillion” if Trump got rates to near zero, Timiraos responded by quote-posting an answer X owner Elon Musk’s “Grok” chatbot wrote saying the critic’s claim “overstates reality.”

Like his claim on interest rates, Trump has resorted to fuzzy math in the past. Economists routinely dismiss Trump’s description of tariffs as a tax on foreign nations, and must remind the reading public that his threat to hit places like Brazil with a 50 percent tariff on all imported goods will likely hurt everyday Americans far more than the Brazilian government.

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Social inequality and weak democratic institutions are linked to faster ageing, as are other environmental features such as high levels of air pollution, finds a study spanning four continents. Education was one of the top factors that protected against faster ageing.

The study also showed that ageing is accelerated by less-surprising factors such as high blood pressure and heart disease. But the link to social and political influences could help to explain why rates of ageing vary from country to country, the authors say.

“It’s a very important study”, says Claudia Kimie Suemoto, a geriatrician at the University of São Paulo in Brazil who was not involved in the work. “It gives us the global perspective of how these dependent factors shape ageing in different regions of the world.”

Political polarization and uncertainty mean that “we are living in a world of despair”, and that ages people, says lead author Agustín Ibañez, who directs the Latin American Brain Health Institute in Santiago. “We don’t think about the health impacts that this is going to have in the long run.”

The study was published today in Nature Medicine.

Age gaps

The study included 161,981 participants from 40 countries: 7 in Latin America, 27 in Europe, 4 in Asia and 2 in Africa. Just the process of harmonizing these data sets — such as checking that variables were measured in similar ways in different countries — took about 3 years, says Ibañez.

The researchers examined previous research to identify possible factors that hasten or slow ageing and that could be compared across countries. They fed data of these factors into a machine-learning model that predicts a person’s chronological age. That allowed them to calculate each person’s ‘biobehavioural age gap’: the difference between their true chronological age and their age as predicted by the model.

For example, if you are 50 years old but the model predicts that you are 60 years old, you have a biobehavioural age gap of 10 years.

Schooling protects

The top medical risk factors for faster ageing were high blood pressure, hearing impairment and heart disease. Other risk factors included unhealthy weight, alcohol consumption, sleep problems, diabetes and impaired vision.

The factors that provide the best protection against speedy ageing were education, ability to perform activities of daily living and sound cognitive abilities. Other protective factors included physical activity, good memory and the ability to walk well.

Egypt and South Africa had the fastest ageing, whereas European countries showed the slowest ageing, and nations in Asia and Latin America were in the middle.

Accelerated ageing was strongly linked to markers of eroding democracy — such as restricted voting rights, unfair elections and restrictions on the freedom of political parties. “We never expected that,” says Ibañez. Faster ageing was also linked to lower national income levels, exposure to air pollution, social inequality and gender inequality.

The researchers had data points up to 4 years apart for 21,631 participants, allowing for comparison over time. In these data sets, a bigger biobehavioural age gap predicted greater declines in both cognition and the ability to perform daily tasks.

Toll of stress

How physical ageing is linked to a person’s socio-economic and political environment is unclear, but Ibañez hypothesizes that the mechanism might be stress’s physical effects on the body and brain. “Inflammation is a huge potential pathway,” he says.

One of the limitations of working with data from so many countries, Ibañez says, is that the researchers had to omit many variables, such as smoking, that are known to strongly affect ageing, but were measured in very different ways across countries.

Another limitation, Suemoto says, is that 4 years of follow-up data “is very limited for the ageing process”. She would like to see data points 10 or 20 years apart.

Both Suemoto and Ibañez are excited about the possibility that public policy could be tailored to the factors that contribute most to ageing in a specific nation.

Intriguingly, the model predicted that some people were biologically younger than their chronological age. Perhaps studying the factors that these people have in common could point to interventions to protect others from premature ageing, Ibañez says.

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Few people have heard of Sir Edward Coke, but most people reading this live under his rule. Coke served as the Attorney General of England in the early 17th century, which meant he would recommend laws to the Crown to implement. And in 1604, he gave us one of the bedrocks of the Common Law, used all around the world: “An Englishman’s home is his castle.”

Of course, today we might say an American’s, a Canadian’s, or an Australian’s, but Coke’s legal point was that what you did within your home, so long as it was within the law, was your business. The police cannot enter your home unwarranted. The sheriffs cannot bash your door down without good reason. What you did in private was up to you.

The distinction between the private and public spheres extends far beyond Coke’s corner of jurisprudence. There exists a long philosophical tradition that divides what we do, say, and believe in public, and what happens behind closed doors. How you eat, talk, or have sex are matters for the home. How you raise your kids or spend your free time are private things. But one of the most prominent topics philosophers have often hoped to banish to the parlor room was religion. Philosophize in public, worship in private. Rationality in the marketplace, faith and emotion at home.

In this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, philosopher Simon Critchley, author of On Mysticism, argues this needs to change.

The German divide

The idea that you can believe what you like at home but must reason like everyone else in public owes much of its popularity to Martin Luther and Immanuel Kant. Both wrestled with a similar anxiety: What happens when private religious feelings spill out into the street? Luther, who opened the doors to the Reformation and made the Bible readable by the masses, quickly became nervous when people began reading it too freely. The radical fringes — peasants, Anabaptists, visionaries — started claiming divine authority for political revolt. Luther recoiled, siding with princes and writing that rebellious peasants should be “struck down like rabid dogs.”

Kant inherited this wariness and tried to offer a compromise for Protestantism. “What Kant gives us,” Critchley says, “is this modern idea of religious experience as authorized privately, but as not being sanctioned publicly.” In his 1784 essay What is Enlightenment?, Kant argues that “public reason” must be disciplined and rational, while “private reason” can hold whatever faith it likes — so long as it stays in its lane. As Critchley puts it, “Privately, you can believe whatever you like, but you have to respect that distinction between the public and the private.”

It’s a tidy solution: Religion can flourish quietly in the home but mustn’t interrupt public life. The Enlightenment, in this view, is defined by sober rationality that keeps emotion and mysticism at arm’s length. For Critchley, though, this isn’t reason — it’s repression. It’s probably not even possible.

Guido Reni / Public Domain / The MET / Big Think

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Amid wanton budget cuts by the Trump Administration that put thousands of government employees out of work, canceled school lunch programs for needy kids, and zeroed out funding for crucial research into cancer, U.S. taxpayers shelled out for rental cars and hotel rooms as the president’s two eldest sons pursued private business deals in the Middle East.

Federal procurement data reviewed by The Independent shows more than $40,000 in disbursements by the Secret Service, whose agents accompanied Don Jr. and Eric Trump to Qatar and Saudi Arabia this spring, underwritten by the American public.

One transaction, a $13,984 payment arranged by the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh and funded by the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, describes the outlay as: “ERIC TRUMP Protective USSS Visit – 4 rental vehicles.”

It was prepared on April 20, and approved on May 13, 2025, the same day President Trump arrived in the kingdom. However, Eric, 41, was not part of the official delegation, according to reports.

A second transaction, for $26,813.24, was arranged by the State Department and funded by the U.S. Embassy in Doha. covered a room for Donald Trump Jr., 47, at The Ned, a 5-star hotel and members-only club located in a building formerly occupied by the Qatari Interior Ministry.

“Trump Jr Visit – May 25 – Team X,” reads the expenditure, which was prepared on May 11 and approved on May 18, 2025, nearly a week after the president was in town.

“Expect tactile furnishings, classical details, and all the essentials for a comfortable home away from home,” the property’s website tells prospective travelers. “Guests enjoy access to Ned’s Club Spa and Gym throughout their stay. Airport transfers in our BMW 7 Series can be arranged upon request.”

Together, lodging and local transportation for Trump’s two adult sons cost taxpayers at least $40,797.24, a figure that does not include air travel, agents’ salaries, meals, and other significant outlays.

A Secret Service spokesman on Monday told The Independent, “We support any of our protectees, that go anywhere in the world, including foreign trips. For these foreign trips, we have personnel on the ground before a protectee gets there, so we may be on the ground several days in advance, working with the local government and local authorities.”

The contracts themselves, such as the hotel rooms and rental cars required for Don Jr. and Eric, are executed on behalf of the Secret Service by U.S. embassies in the destination countries, according to the agency spokesman.

He said the members of the Trump family “are our protectees, we protect them, regardless of where they go. When you’re a protectee, you have round-the-clock protection anywhere in the world. It doesn’t matter what type of trip it is, they’re getting protection.”

The Trump Organization, which is being nominally run by Don Jr. and Eric while their father serves a second term in the White House, recently partnered with a Qatari real estate firm – backed by the country’s sovereign wealth fund – to build a Trump-branded luxury golf resort in the emirate.

The deal was announced two weeks before Trump made the jaunt to Qatar, which subsequently “gifted” the president a $400 million Boeing 747 for his own use.

The Trump family is also developing two new real estate projects in the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh, as well as a Trump Tower to be erected in Jeddah.

“Combining coastal elegance with urban sophistication, Trump Tower Jeddah delivers an unmatched lifestyle,” read an April 30 press release issued by the Trump Organization. “From refined residences to world-class amenities and personalized service, every detail reflects the signature Trump standard of excellence.”

Two weeks later, the White House formally announced that Saudi Arabia had committed to buying at least $100 billion worth of military equipment from the U.S., and said Qatar had agreed to purchase $200 billion worth of U.S.-built jets from Boeing, as well as some $3 billion in American-made drones from General Atomics and Raytheon.

The trips by Don Jr. and Eric raised numerous questions about the Trump family’s aggressive monetization of the presidency, which administration officials attempted to minimize as a non-issue. During the president’s first term, the Trump Organization vowed not to pursue any foreign deals while the company’s namesake was in office – a promise promptly broken, according to an investigation by anti-corruption watchdog Global Witness.

When Trump returned to the White House in January 2021, he released an ethics agreement that said the Trump Organization would not directly strike any deals with foreign governments. However, it included no prohibition on doing business with private companies abroad, and the president’s family business is now involved in no fewer than 21 Trump-branded projects throughout the world, according to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or, CREW.

Still, prior to Trump’s Middle East sojourn, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted that the notion Trump would personally benefit from his family’s private business pursuits was, in a word, “ridiculous.”

“The president is abiding by all conflict of interest laws,” Leavitt said. “The president is a successful businessman, and I think, frankly, that it’s one of the many reasons that people reelected him back to this office.”

In October 2018, U.S. taxpayers were hit with a $90,000-plus hotel bill for First Lady Melania Trump and her Secret Service detail, who were in Cairo for six hours but did not spend the night.

A vacation to Berlin the previous year by Tiffany Trump, the president’s youngest daughter, cost taxpayers at least $22,000 in hotel stays for the Secret Service agents accompanying her and her boyfriend.

But when the Secret Service traveled with members of the Trump family to Trump-owned hotels, the agency was reportedly charged “exorbitant” markups far above the usual room rate, contradicting Eric Trump’s previous claim that agents were provided lodging “at cost.”

At the same time, a vindictive Trump has sought revenge on officials he believes wronged him during his first term by revoking Secret Service details assigned to protect President Joe Biden’s adult children, along with those looking after former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former National Security Adviser John Bolton, and a host of others.

Craig Holman, a governmental ethics expert at nonprofit watchdog Public Citizen, told The Independent it is “sheer hypocrisy” for security expenses to be provided for Don Jr. and Eric, “but taken away from far more important officials out of favor with Trump.”

During Barack Obama’s time in office, before Trump’s foray into national politics, he raged on Twitter about the cost of providing security for the president and his family, taking aim at supposed “taxpayer funded vacations” costing the American people “millions of dollars.” Yet, according to government spending data compiled by CREW, the Trump family ended up taking 12 times the number of trips the Obamas did, depleting the Secret Service’s protection budget and forcing the agency to request more funding.

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CLIMATEWIRE | In the past decade, as extreme weather killed nearly 700 people in Texas, the state relinquished $225 million in federal grant money that it was supposed to spend on protecting residents from disasters, federal records show.

The money had come from a special federal disaster program that’s given states billions of dollars for projects such as flood protection, tornado safety, and the type of warning systems that could have saved some of the 129 people killed in Texas’ recent flash flooding. Texas had rejected two requests from the flooded county for a small portion of the federal money to set up a flood-warning system.

But Texas, like most states, has chosen not to spend a significant chunk of its mitigation grant money. States routinely let the government reclaim unspent money — or let available money go unused for as long as 20 years, according to an analysis of federal records by POLITICO’s E&E News.

In addition to ceding the $225 million, Texas has not spent $505 million of the $820 million — 62 percent — that it got for mitigation projects nearly eight years ago after Hurricane Harvey killed 89 people and caused $160 billion in damage, records show. The funds remain available.

The unspent money highlights a central flaw in the nation’s approach to protecting against climate change: The federal government gives states and communities both money and responsibility for disaster protection. Yet states and communities often lack the personnel and expertise to spend it fully.

Since July 2015, the federal Hazard Mitigation Grant Program has showered states with more than $23 billion to protect their counties, neighborhoods and homes against future disaster damage. The grants have been given automatically after each federally declared disaster and are separate from the federal money that pays for disaster cleanup and rebuilding.

But nearly $21 billion of the grant money remains unspent, E&E News found, leaving people vulnerable to the deadly flooding, winds and wildfires that climate change is intensifying. Some of the grant money was awarded in recent years, but most was awarded more than three years ago.

In the same period since 2015, states also relinquished a total of $1.4 billion in mitigation grant funding that had been approved but states never spent.

The figure includes the $225 million that Texas gave up over the past 10 years as the government closed a series of partially spent hazard mitigation grants it had awarded the state since 2001. The grants were worth a total of $850 million, which means Texas did not spend more than a quarter of the money. Most recently, on April 29, Texas ceded $5.7 million of a $13 million mitigation grant it got in 2016.

“It’s a lost opportunity to build resilience,” said Peter Gaynor, who ran the Federal Emergency Management Agency from 2019 to 2021. FEMA operates the mitigation grant program.

“What happens time and time again is mitigation money becomes an afterthought,” Gaynor said.

The Texas Division of Emergency Management, which handles the FEMA mitigation grants, did not respond directly to questions about unspent money.

Andrew Mahaleris, a spokesperson for Gov. Greg Abbott (R), said in a statement, “The State continues to disburse HMGP funding as grants are awarded and encourages local officials to apply.”

The large amount of unspent hazard mitigation money prompted President Donald Trump in April to stop approving new allocations, a move that angered some state officials.

A FEMA spokesperson said the agency is now helping states “identify projects and draw down balances in a way that makes the nation more resilient, while also responsibly safeguarding American taxpayer dollars.”

Trump has assailed FEMA since taking office but on Friday offered unusual praise when he visited the damaged area in Texas. “FEMA has been really headed by some very good people,” Trump said.

Although states had automatically received FEMA grant money after each disaster, spending the money has been excruciating at times. FEMA typically must approve each grant-funded project.

“It’s such a cumbersome process,” said David Fogerson, who ran Nevada’s emergency management and homeland security agency from 2020 to 2024.

States and communities — or their contractors — must submit detailed plans showing that a project is feasible, complies with environmental and preservation laws, and makes sense financially. States, counties, and municipalities also must have a written plan — typically a couple of hundred pages and updated every five years — showing its broad strategy to reduce disaster damage.

A Government Accountability Office report in 2021 found that state officials were “overwhelmingly dissatisfied” with the application process.

“It almost becomes overload when you’re trying to manage the disaster and then you’re trying to measure how to protect against the next disaster,” Fogerson said.

Nevada has spent only a quarter of the $3.4 million hazard grant it got from FEMA after a wildfire in 2016, records show.

“It’s a blessing and a curse,” Fogerson said of the grant money.

Federal funds rarely used for warning systems

Kerr County, Texas, the site of the flash flooding that began July 4, encountered the administrative gantlet in 2016 when it asked the state in 2016 and in 2018 for a small piece of its FEMA mitigation money to establish a flood warning system.

Warning systems are a crucial but low-profile part of worldwide strategies to protect against natural hazards, particularly in places prone to flash flooding, which occurs when sudden, intense precipitation causes rivers to overflow.

Texas officials are scrutinizing the limited warnings that were transmitted as the Guadalupe River surged in the middle of the night and devoured areas, including a girls’ sleepaway camp where at least 27 campers and counselors were killed.

In Kerrville, Texas, which was at the center of the flash flooding, City Manager Dalton Rice on Saturday pledged “a full review of the disaster response.”

Trump’s staff reductions and proposed budget cuts to the National Weather Service offices have set off their own alarms that inadequate weather alerts will increase the number of disaster-related deaths.

Kerr County’s request for grant money was denied in 2016 by the Texas Division of Emergency Management because the county did not have the required mitigation plan.

When the county of 50,000 people in central Texas Hill Country applied again after Hurricane Harvey, the state denied the application after deciding to spend all the grant money in Harvey-damaged counties.

“If localities do not meet federal requirements, they will not be able to access the funding. The State works with applicants to support efforts to bring them into compliance,” said Mahaleris, the spokesperson for Gov. Abbott.

The Texas Legislature will convene a special session July 21 to consider new laws that would improve warning systems in flood-prone areas.

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Video footage of the office, shared by New York-based news outlets, showed red paint splattered on the building and a sign hanging up that read, “AOC funds genocide in Gaza.” Authorities have not yet made any arrests in connection to the vandalism, Politico reported.

Ocasio-Cortez has been a vocal critic of Israel’s actions in Gaza, but she sparked outcry from some progressives after voting on Friday against the amendment, introduced by Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, to the defense spending bill.

The New York Congresswoman defended her vote in a post on X over the weekend.

“Marjorie Taylor Greene’s amendment does nothing to cut off offensive aid to Israel nor end the flow of US munitions being used in Gaza. Of course I voted against it,” she said. “What it does do is cut off defensive Iron Dome capacities while allowing the actual bombs killing Palestinians to continue.”

“I have long stated that I do not believe that adding to the death count of innocent victims to this war is constructive to its end,” she continued. “I remain focused on cutting the flow of US munitions that are being used to perpetuate the genocide in Gaza.”

The amendment didn’t end up making it into the final version of the defense spending bill passed by the House on Friday, which Ocasio-Cortez voted against. She responded to the criticism in another post on X on Monday, including screenshots showing that she voted against the spending bill and adding, “If you’re saying I voted for military funding, you are lying. Receipts attached.”

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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) listens during a mark up meeting with the House Committee on Energy and Commerce committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on May 13, 2025.Anna Moneymaker—Getty Images

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Facebook has deleted more than 10 million accounts as part of an ongoing purge of the world’s most popular social network.

Meta, Facebook’s parent company, said the move was aimed at “cracking down on spammy content” and promoting authentic accounts, however some users have complained about being wrongly caught up in the action.

Facebook confirmed the figure in a blog post, revealing that more than a million accounts were deleted each month in the first half of 2025.

“Too often the same meme or video pops up repeatedly – sometimes from accounts pretending to be the creator and other times from different spammy accounts,” the company wrote in the blog post.

“It dulls the experience for all and makes it harder for fresh voices to break through. We’re introducing stronger measures to reduce unoriginal content on Facebook and ultimately protect and elevate creators sharing original content.”

Dozens of users shared similar experiences on social media of their accounts being removed, despite being legitimate accounts, with some blaming AI systems for wrongly identifying their accounts as inauthentic.

“It seems that the ability to connect is being stripped away by an algorithm that lacks understanding,” one user wrote in a post to the Reddit forum MetaLawsuits.

“Our business is currently suffering now as we struggle to reach clients, business contacts and maintain relationships, while my son’s autism support network has been severed, leaving us feeling abandoned… The disconnection feels inhumane, unfair, and utterly heartbreaking.”

Referred to as the “Meta ban wave”, the mass deletions also appear to have impacted people on Instagram, which is also owned by Meta.

The Independent has reached out to the company for further comment about legitimate accounts being deleted.

Any user whose account has been deleted will receive an email informing them of the action.

Facebook users can appeal any account suspension within 180 days, according to the company’s support pages, after which time the profile will be permanently deleted.

The large-scale removal comes as other tech companies take steps to clean up their own platforms.

n 2023, Google announced that it would delete all inactive Gmail, Photos and Drive accounts in a move that continues to impact millions of users.

Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg has previously proposed even more extreme purges of Facebook in an effort to boost engagement.

In 2022, he reportedly sent an internal email that laid out a plan to delete the friends of all Facebook users.

“One potentially crazy idea is to consider wiping everyone’s graphs [connections] and having them start again,” he wrote to company executives, who pushed back on the idea.

The Independent has always had a global perspective. Built on a firm foundation of superb international reporting and analysis, The Independent now enjoys a reach that was inconceivable when it was launched as an upstart player in the British news industry. For the first time since the end of the Second World War, and across the world, pluralism, reason, a progressive and humanitarian agenda, and internationalism – Independent values – are under threat. Yet we, The Independent, continue to grow.

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Sorting your trash and recycling is common practice: break down the cardboard boxes, separate the compostable material and plastics and put them into the correct containers, put the trash on the curb, and you’re done. But what happens next is where the story gets interesting. A billion-dollar industry exists around moving countless tons of waste from wealthy countries to poorer ones. For two years journalist Alexander Clapp lived out of a backpack and visited the smelliest parts of the most beautiful places on Earth—looking for hidden dump sites in the Venezuelan jungle and scaling mountains of trash in Ghana—for his new book Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash. He tracks the massive scope of waste management, from top-level international relations to underground whisper networks, and reveals the dirty underbelly of what happens to our trash.Scientific American spoke with Clapp about the people who break apart and sort our trash all over the world, the growth of the global waste economy, and the future of waste management.

[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]

Can you tell me where our exported garbage and not-quite-recyclable goods end up?

It would depend what type of trash we’re talking about, when we’re talking about it, or from which country it’s being discarded. But a lot of global trash over the last 30 to 40 years has been going to poor countries under the guise that it’s being recycled. That trash will get broken down, or someone will attempt to make some use out of it—to extract some profit from it—and that’s an extremely dangerous an

d often lethal process where all sorts of contaminants and forever chemicals enter local ecosystems. They go into the air, they go into the water, and they do huge amounts of damage—damage to, disproportionately, the most vulnerable populations in the world.

Why would one country ever, under any circumstances, buy the garbage from another country? Is someone getting scammed, or is there a legitimate reason to buy boatloads of biological, technological, or toxic waste?

That is one of the reasons why I got interested in this topic. We send our waste to the very countries that cannot handle their own domestic waste outputs. I think the dichotomy that’s worth keeping in mind with the waste trade is that it’s not necessarily rich countries versus poor countries; within poor countries, you have importers who are actually buying the waste for pennies, and they are very much part of the problem. The most important thing to understand about the waste trade is that in the 1980s, many poor countries felt that they had no option other than to import waste from the so-called global north. They were heavily indebted; they were desperate for factories, ports, industry of any kind. And so I think there’s a really insipid, disturbing history of how and why the waste trade began.

Which leads to the question—how much money is actually involved in this global waste economy?

Let’s say it costs $140 to put a ton of old plastic in a landfill. A waste broker would actually have to pay the landfill in order to bury that plastic. But what if instead you could sell that plastic to an importer in Malaysia for a few dollars? Then you’re not paying $140; you’re actually making $2 or $3. That said, a lot of the waste trade, by nature, is operating underground. If you’re sending waste to another country, you’re not calling it trash on any export document—you’re calling it recyclable material. One thing that I hope my book encourages or leads people to question is how much of our waste is actually moving around the world.

What are you most interested in regarding the future of this waste economy and of waste management on a global scale?

I think what’s really interesting about the global waste trade is that in many ways it’s like the global drug trade. You see organized crime groups that are getting more and more involved in the waste trade because, frankly, the supply of this stuff is endless. The punishment if you get caught moving waste is negligible. I think the future of waste export and waste movement is organized crime. I think they’re going to see this as a monumentally lucrative opportunity.

What was the most shocking story you uncovered while researching for this book?

The most shocking story probably was with the cruise ship-dismantling industry in Türkiye. On the Aegean coast of Türkiye, there’s a [town] called Aliağa where American cruise ship companies disproportionately send a lot of their ships to be dismantled. And you would think that the process of deconstructing a cruise ship would be mechanically refined, but it’s actually kind of this maniacal process done almost entirely by hand, where you have armies of helmeted men filing into these cruise ships and breaking this stuff up. One thing that I found was that most of the men who get recruited into doing this work have little idea of what they’re doing. They’ve never seen the ocean before. They were recruited from the middle of Türkiye and given a week’s worth of training. It’s absolutely excruciating.

What was the most surprisingly common occurrence across all of your research?

In terms of the most common story that I would hear, it’s the extent to which, in poor countries, trash, and especially plastic, is just regarded as another commodity. Generally, [the people I encountered didn’t] think about this stuff as a potentially toxic substance. That was shocking to me. In places such as Java and [other parts of] Indonesia, hundreds of tons of Western plastic are imported every week and used as fuel in tofu factories, and then that tofu gets exported around the world’s most populous island, Java]. I was just struck by how kind of pedestrian it seems to just burn plastic in places to get rid of it or to find some use for it.

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