Farewell to Plague?

Other diseases may have taken a greater toll of human life, but none has spread more terror than the Black Death. In the 14th century, plague reached from Asia through Asia Minor to Europe, where it killed 25 million people (one in four by conservative estimate, perhaps one in three). Three centuries later the rat-borne scourge devastated London, killing 70,000 --one-sixth of the population. Then it lay relatively dormant, taking a regular annual toll in parts of Asia where it was endemic. In 1896 it burst out of South China, through the port of Hong Kong. From there tramp steamers carried it around the world, causing at least 10 million deaths in a decade, 6,000,000 of them in India. Ever since, plague has simmered in a dozen infected areas, has caused several thousand deaths in most years. Last week the World Health Organization announced in Geneva that in 1957 only 514 deaths due to plague were reported in the free world and only 44 of them in India. At long last, it looked as though the Black Death was licked.

Plague is caused by a bacillus, Pasteurella pestis, whose natural habitat is the rat. Fleas carry it from rats to humans. The disease, called bubonic when it affects the lymph nodes, pneumonic when it attacks the lungs, used to be 90% fatal; nowadays antibiotics and sulfa drugs can defeat it in 90% of cases, and widespread warfare against rats and fleas in underprivileged areas helps prevent outbreaks.

In 1957 Burma had the worst record with 198 cases; in the New World, Ecuador led with 72. In the U.S., where the bacillus has found a reservoir in wild rodents (TIME, July 9, 1956), there was one probable but unconfirmed case in Texas.

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