Medicine: The Black Death Is Here

All over the West last week members of the U.S. Public Health Service and State agencies shot rabbits and ground squirrels, trapped mice, dug dead prairie dogs from their burrows. They took their catches in tight-woven bags to trucks outfitted as laboratories, parked in the shadows of mountains. They combed the rodents for fleas, then slit the carcasses to remove certain viscera and tissues. In many viscera the bacteriologists found what they feared would be there: the oval bacteria of Pasteurella pestis—the plague, the Black Death.

Their researches highlight an ominous fact; the U.S. now has a vast reservoir of plague infection among the wild rodents of the West. It is too widespread to be wiped out, and it is spreading eastward. Last year it was discovered for the first time in Colorado and North Dakota.* Says a U.S. Public Health Service doctor: "There is no reason to assume that the infection will not spread to the rodents of the Great Plains and into the Mississippi Valley and Eastern U.S."

So far this year no one has died of the plague. Usually one or two persons a year are attacked—a woman in California who buried a chipmunk; a boy in Idaho who stole a magpie's egg from a nest littered with half-eaten remains of ground squirrels; a hunter in Wyoming who bagged a jack rabbit. The disease is chiefly transmitted from beast to beast and beast to man, by fleas. In human beings it takes three forms, identical in cause and in effect (probably death within a week):

> Bubonic plague, affecting the lymphatic glands and producing dark ugly swelling (called bubo) of the groin or armpits.

> Septicemic plague, affecting the circulatory system and producing skin carbuncles.

> Pneumonic plague, affecting the lungs.

Pneumonic plague is the greatest menace. Reason: it alone can be transmitted directly from one person to another without the help of fleas. Like septicemic plague, it is difficult to diagnose and is not infrequently mistaken for other diseases. Hence U.S. mortality records probably do not show how often the plague has killed.

There Is No Cure for the plague. Serum, given immediately after a quick diagnosis, helps somewhat. Quantities of plague serum are kept ready & waiting at U.S. Public Health laboratories in San

Francisco and Hamilton, Mont. The main reason why so few people have caught the plague is that—so far—its carriers live in the thinly settled regions of the West. But epidemiologists fear that ground squirrels will transmit the disease to city rats, so that it may emerge catastrophically into the human community. Foreshadowings of such a nightmare occurred in Oakland in 1919 (twelve deaths), and in Los Angeles in 1924 (30 deaths).

To the despair of many doctors, the disease is commonly known in the West by the misleading euphemism of "sylvatic plague." This means merely that wild rodents, rather than rats, are the chief carriers of the disease.