Black Pneumonia

Last week, scientists found a name for that grim plague which, since the untoward demise of a certain Mexican woman three weeks ago, has caused a series of deaths so sinister and baffling in the poor quarter of Los Angeles : "black pneumonia." Having thus damned their enemy with a definition, California physicians, health authorities, sharpened the temper of their vigilance. The street-ends of the infected district were barricaded with ropes, guards were posted, armed with short shotguns, to enforce the quarantine. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors appropriated $25,000 to combat the epidemic, appointed a special committee of experts to organize the measures. A serum, manufactured in Philadelphia, was rushed to Los Angeles by Transcontinental Air Service. The shipment contained more than 500 doses, enough, it was thought, to meet the present emergency. Four more deaths occurred, bringing the total to 30. Of these new fatalities, two were men who contracted the distemper while working to subdue it: Father Brualla, pastor of the Nuestra Senora la Reina mission, who fell a victim when administering last sacraments to the dying; Emmet McLaughlin, ambulance driver. As the week ended, order was restored in the district; the Red Cross flag flew over the schoolhouse; the curse was abating.

Bubonic and pneumonic plague are forms of the same disease. The bubonic germ is a surly one that lives in slatternly wild creatures, insects, rodents and in the filthy shambles of great cities. In those places where nature fights civilization and both lose, the plague waits, curling its haunches. From China, in 1900, it came first to San Francisco; since then from Mexico, riding on fleas that ride on Mexicans that ride on burros.

But, as a matter of fact, (newspapers, such as The Chicago Tribune, to the contrary), pneumonic plague is transmitted chiefly from man to man by sneezing, coughing, spitting. It is only distantly related to the vermin-carried germ. And the pneumonic--not the bubonic--plague attacked Los Angeles.

Pneumonic plague killed 60,000 persons in Manchuria during 1910-11, and 9,000 during 1920-21. la India, during the twenty years from 1896 to 1917, there occurred 9,841,396 death from this cause.

The outbreak in Los Angeles is the second to occur in the United States, the first being in Oakland, Calif., in September, 1919. In that epidemic there were 13 cases with 12 deaths.