Prediction of indicators about transboundary natural plague foci in the Balkhash-Alakol deposition of Kazakhstan and the Dzungarian basin of China

The Kazakhstan-China territorial border has vast swathes (1782.75 km), where transboundary natural plague foci are located and where the "Great Silk Road" used to pass. This road played a major role in cultural, trade and economic ties between the countries of Europe, South-West and Central Asia and China, where the operation of the transport corridor "Western Europe - Western China" has been launched. A comprehensive assessment of the spatio-temporal characteristics of the plague foci in the Balkhash-Alakol depression of Kazakhstan compared to the transboundary plague foci in the Dzungarian basin (depression) has been carried out in China in order to identify and build a chain of predictors in the search for individual predictive informative features and their subsequent integration for the formation of target tasks. The paper presents data on the results of epizootological monitoring conducted in natural plague foci of Kazakhstan in the investigated region over the past 30 years, on an area of 124.9 thousand km2, and laboratory data on the results of phenotypic and molecular-genetic properties of more than 600 strains of plague bacterium isolated in this territory. A comparative analysis was carried out from the data obtained by Chinese scientists on the characteristics of Yersinia pestis strains that form natural plague foci in the Dzungarian Basin of China. Improvement and organization within epidemiological monitoring for plague, study, and determination of prognostic parameters in transboundary territories is crucial, given that on the level of that, the whole complex of preventive works for preserving epidemiological stability and biological safety would greatly depend.