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.

Dreadful Solitude. In 1347 the Black Death appeared on the eastern horizon of Europe like a "thick, stinking mist." By 1349 the whole continent was sick and demoralized. At least one-fourth of central Europe's population died in the greatest disaster which ever befell the Continent. Half the population of England died. At Avignon the Pope consecrated the Rhone so that corpses could be dumped into it for Christian burial. In Italy Petrarch wept over "the empty houses, the abandoned towns, the squalid country, the fields crowded with the dead, the vast and dreadful solitude over the whole world."

The Black Death abated. But in 1661 it again began to sweep in from the Levant. In 1664 Diarist Samuel Pepys "heard little noise day or night but tolling of bells"; some 69,000 Londoners died. Once more the plague retreated, nation by nation, year by year, into Asia.

"This disappearance of epidemic plague from Europe presents one of the unsolved mysteries of epidemiology." wrote the late Dr. Hans Zinsser of Harvard. For Europeans did not become plague-resistant: they still succumb readily enough when in such plague centers as India. Nor did they become notably more hygienic: the flea still flourishes in much of Europe. Perhaps the plague bacteria lost some of their virulence. But they may regain their virulence as they did in the 14th Century.

Everlasting and Permanent. The Black Death reached the U.S. in another great eruption (1892-1902). It began around the primary plague focus in China's Yunnan (Burma Road) Province, spread to India and seaports all over the globe. Some 12,000,000 people died in India alone. In 1900 it reached San Francisco, probably via ship-borne rats from Honolulu. Within the next two years some 113 persons (mostly Chinese) are known to have died in San Francisco of plague.

Today the U.S. owes its permanent plague menace to California's indomitable chamber of commerce spirit. In 1901 California's Governor, business interests and press denied that the plague existed. Only San Francisco's mayor and board of health tried to fight the epidemic, braving the abuse and ridicule of all but one of the city's newspapers. Federal public-health workers also met hostility.

In 1904 nobody died of the plague, so it was pronounced gone for good. California breathed a sigh of relief and tried to forget the plague. But after the earthquake of 1906, plague again haunted the ruined city: 160 known cases appeared in 1907 (others are believed to have been concealed or wrongly diagnosed). This time the infection was attacked in earnest. But it was too late--plague had spread from city, rats to wild rodents of the hinterlands. A campaign against ground squirrels was begun, but it dwindled and collapsed about 1920. Again California tried to forget the plague.

In 1933 and 1934 two people died of the plague. A U.S. Public Health Service survey turned up the horrifying fact that the plague had infiltrated as far east as New Mexico and Wyoming. It might have been exterminated in 1903; in 1934 it was too late.

In one respect, the plague latent in the U.S. is a greater menace than that of China and medieval Europe. "Rat plague rises and falls within a century and finally flickers out. Wild rodent-sylvatic plague is everlasting and permanent" So said a leading U.S. plague expert. Dr. Karl F. Meyer of the University of California.

"Americans," he warned, "will have to learn to live with the plague. . . ."

* Last year it was also discovered for the first time on a bird, the burrowing owl, which often lives underground with rats, ground squirrels, prairie dogs.

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