Medicine: Rustic Menace

Ever since bubonic plague, the fearsome "Black Death" of the Middle Ages, reached the West Coast from China in 1900, U.S. health officials have waged ceaseless war against it. In the century's first quarter, the U.S. had 483 cases, 60% of them fatal. Then U.S. preventive measures (primarily rodent control) took effect: between 1925 and 1947 there were only 22 cases. Last week, for the first time in two years, two U.S. cases were identified, both in New Mexico.

Man shares the disease with rodents, and the germ is carried to man by rat fleas. The West, in its great open spaces, has a zooful of rodents which have become infested with rat fleas, among them prairie dogs, picket-pin gophers, ground squirrels, chipmunks. The Public Health Service called the disease "sylvatic (woodland) plague." It is still bubonic, in the sense that it can cause swelling of the lymph glands of the armpit or groin, but it has become so rare that the word plague could well be dropped.

The two New Mexico villagers hospitalized last week (a ten-year-old boy at Taos, a 37-year-old man at Albuquerque) need not share the fate of the helpless millions slaughtered by bubonic plague in the past. At week's end, both were recovering handily, the boy treated with streptomycin and sulfadiazine, the man with penicillin and aureomycin.