Medicine: The Black Death

A five-year-old boy lay in bed burning with fever, his right groin swollen. Suspecting that this was no ordinary disease, his doctor took a sample of fluid from the swollen gland, started home to examine it. But near the house he saw something that confirmed his terrible suspicions: a batch of dead squirrels.

The boy had the plague—the same Black Death that swept over Europe in the 14th Century, killing a fourth of the population. This case occurred in California last month. The boy caught the disease from fleas which carried the plague bacilli (Pasteurella pestis) from sick squirrels. No effective treatment for plague is known, and the boy died in three days.

Although this was only the second case of plague in the U.S. this year, the U.S. Public Health Service was so alarmed that Surgeon General Thomas Parran called a meeting of anti-plague workers in Salt Lake City last week.

Only 500 cases of plague have been reported in the U.S. since 1900. These were all in western and southern States (see cut). But, said health officers last week, the disease has been smoldering for years in ground squirrels, rats, rabbits, other rodents. From the coast the plague is slowly moving east. If the disease should be passed from country rats to city rats, there would be danger of great epidemics.

The plague is spread in two ways: 1) by fleas; 2) by the sneezes of victims who suffer from the “pneumonic” form of the disease. To combat it, the conference last week asked for a Government expenditure of $1,800,000, mostly for a war on rodents.