"The town of Tsagaannuur... was recently sealed off following the deaths of a local couple who contracted the plague from eating the raw meat and organs of an infected marmot..."

"... Some Mongolians believe eating the rodent’s uncooked innards to be 'very good for health,'... The husband and wife reportedly ate the kidney, gall bladder and stomach of the creature.... The 38-year-old man, who worked as a border agent, and his wife, 37, died of multiple organ failure caused by septicemic plague....  Deaths caused by the plague — a disease carried by small rodents that was responsible for wiping out a third of Europe’s population nearly 700 years ago and killing millions in China, Hong Kong and nearby port cities in the 1800s — are much more rare in modern times because of antibiotics, according to the CDC. But reports of people getting infected have continued to pop up around the world, including in the United States, William L. Gosnell, a program director with the University of Hawaii at Manoa’s department of tropical medicine, medical microbiology and pharmacology, told The Post. 'The bacteria maintains itself out in the wild in these animal populations,' said Gosnell, who is affiliated with the university’s John A. Burns School of Medicine. The plague is most commonly transmitted to humans by fleas that become infected from biting rodents carrying the yersinia pestis bacteria, which causes the disease..... Gosnell said he has never heard of a person getting the plague from eating raw rodent meat, but added that 'it wouldn’t be surprising. Any time you eat something raw, there’s always a chance for picking up all sorts of different pathogens,' he said. 'There are so many other zoonotic infections they could have picked up, unfortunately due to the locale, it just happened to be plague.... If you cook it, the bacteria is dead, you don’t got a problem,' he said. 'Some things you don’t eat raw.'"

WaPo reports.

Sometimes the precise thing you think you need to do for a particular desired goal is an easily avoided thing that is precisely what takes you as far as possible from that goal. In this case, the thing was eating raw marmot organs and the goal was good health. It's completely easy to cook the organs before eating them and cooking them would have destroyed the plague bacteria that killed them, but they seem to have thought that the rawness of the organs was the key to good health, the extreme opposite of death.

I hope it's not disrespectful to the couple who died — I'm sorry they died — to offer their story as a pattern of human decisionmaking. You're hopeful about an exciting idea — like eating raw marmot organs is good for your health — and you do it because you want what the idea says you'll get, so you do it, changing your good-enough condition into something much worse. It's the difference between do something and first do no harm. You might never consider eating raw marmot organs, but I bet that, many times, you've eaten the metaphorical raw marmot organs or voted for somebody who promised he'd make us all eat metaphorical raw marmot organs.