Medicine: Bubonic Plague

From Guayaquil, Ecuador, last week went triumphant despatches that U. S. Public Health men had eradicated bubonic plague from the community. The men were Drs. John D. Long and Clifford Rush Eskey. Bubonic plague, the Black Death, has been one of man’s most terrific scourges. In the 14th Century it killed 13,000,000 people in China, 24,000,000 in the rest of the East, 25,000,000 (onefourth of the population) in Europe. Its horror is recorded in Daniel DeFoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, 1665, when 70,000 died in London. In 1630, 80,000 perished in Milan. Between 1896 and 1917 it killed 10,000,000 over the world. Although San Francisco is one of the five known endemic foci of bubonic plague,* very seldom does a case now appear in the U. S. Rats, ground squirrels (the chief cause in California) and other rodents carry the germ, Bacillus pestis. Fleas bite the rats, then carry the bacilli to man’s habitations, his clothes, his body. To prevent the disease, rodents must be exterminated and their fleas kept from humans through personal hygiene. Drs. Long and Eskey cleaned Guayaquil by drastically cleaning the city of vermin and teaching the inhabitants personal cleanliness. Their next chore, upon which they are already started: to derat, deflea, deplague Peru.

*The other foci: 1 & 2) in China, whence the modern outbreak of the late 1890s spread, one on the eastern slope of the Himalayas, one on the western slope; 3) from the centre of Arabia to Mesopotamia; 4) Uganda near the source of the White Nile.