Furry Dangers

Two ancient scourges -- typhus and plague -- spread by small, furry, bugridden animals, have invaded the U.S., taken on new character and settled down to stay. Both were recently reported to have become more deeply intrenched than epidemiologists had realized.

Blood Will Tell. Typhus in the Old World is primarily a human disease spread via lice among the unwashed. European immigrants to the U.S. once shared their lice with rats (authorities believe), and the infection began spreading through the U.S. rat population, whose fleas can reinfect human beings with a mild form of typhus (fever, rash, aches, prostration). Happily, "murine typhus" kills less than 1% of its victims. But it has flourished, with human cases soaring from 62 in 1923 to 5.180 in 1945. (Some of the increase is due to improved reporting of the disease.) Chief area of infection: the South, from North Carolina to Texas.

To check its typhus statistics, the U.S. Public Health Service last year began a survey in San Antonio. The blood of some 4,200 people was studied for the presence of typhus antibodies, the germ-fighting substances which form during an infection and remain in the blood. Result: 3.5% showed signs of past typhus infection--which means, said the researchers, that about 700 cases a year had occurred in San Antonio--19 times as many as the annual average of 36 cases reported since 1941. Reasons: 1) some cases are so mild as to escape medical attention; 2) some cases of the unfamiliar disease are wrongly diagnosed.

Black Death. Toward 1900, when the plague, epidemic in Asia, was killing millions, the dread disease spread to San Francisco, probably on shipborne rats. The Black Death caused some 113 known deaths (many other cases were doubtless concealed in the hysterical city). By 1904 the outbreak had died down. Then, in 1907, an alarming discovery was made: the flea-borne infection, which--unlike typhus--is primarily a disease of rats and only incidentally of mankind, had spread to such wild rodents as ground squirrels, rabbits and chipmunks in the San Francisco Bay region.

The plague was found in wild rodents in Nevada in 1936, in Arizona in 1938, Colorado in 1941, Kansas in 1945. It is still so rare that its name is a misnomer. Human plague victims in the infected states have averaged only one or two a year since 1924. Commonest victims: hunters, campers and children who have come in contact with small animals.

Plague-hunting teams, sent out by federal and state agencies, constantly scour the regions of known and possible infection, bagging small animals and analyzing their fleas and viscera for the Pasteurella pestis bacilli. U.S^ Public Health Service scouts have just reported the disease in Texas.*The Service calls it "sylvatic plague," a non-panicky term which veils the fact that it is identical with bubonic plague.

What epidemiologists fear is that the wild rodents may pass on their germ-carrying fleas to city rats, causing a major epidemic. Though an anti-plague vaccine has been developed, it gives imperfect protection, wears off in six months. Says Dr. Karl F. Meyer, chief federal plague expert: "Americans will have to learn to live with the plague. . . ."

*In 1920, 33 cases of bubonic plague (19 deaths) occurred in Texas ports, but no infection was found after 1922.

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