‘Conditions For Plague’

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31543, 4 December 1967, Page 13

‘Conditions For Plague’

(N.Z. Press Association —Copyright) WASHINGTON, December 3. A medical anthropologist said in Washington . yesterday that conditions for massive plague now existed in South Vietnam, the “New York Times” News Service reported.

Conditions there were “strikingly similar” to those in Europe before the outbreak of the great medieval plagues, Alexander Alland jun., assistant professor at Columbia University, New York, said in an interview at the American Anthropological Association convention. The similarities, he said, included the dislocation of medically - unsophisticated people from the small areas to which they had adapted genetically, and the widespread destruction of woodland and foliage, which tended to bring wild rats into contact with domestic rats to begin the plague cycle. “A long-term war in the midst of a dense population in a humid climate is an ideal set-up for trouble,” he said. Professor Alland said fewer than 40 cases of plague were reported each year in South Vietnam from 1954 to 1962 and that 4453 cases were reported last year.

“The first line of defence for a medically-unsophisti-cated people is to stay where they are—that is, to stay in

the areas where they have worked out an adaptation to the environment and its diseases,” he said. “We know that if they move 20 or 30 miles disease rates go up. Under severe dislocation and relocation, which we are now seeing, they crossinfect each other with exotic diseases against which they have no immunity.” He added: “I would submit that the kind of conventional war that has been raging for the past three years is, intentionally or not, a kind of covert biological warfare.” In England, during the 1300 s, he said, destruction of woodland by an expanding population drove wild rats out of their natural habitats and into contact with domestic rats. “Our defoliation in napaiming of the countryisde may be having the same effect in Vietnam, at least that’s my thesis,” he said. Plagues occur, Professor Alland said, when bacteria are communicated by wild rats to domestic rats. When the domestic rats die, their fleas carry the germ to man.