BUBONIC PLAGUE

Evening Star, Issue 19408, 17 November 1926, Page 14

BUBONIC PLAGUE

COUNTRIES THAT CAUSE ITS SPREAD Almost alone of European, nations, Russia still remains a breeding ground for bubonic plague (states “A Physician” in the ‘Daily Mail’). Two and a-half centuries ago bubonic destroyed a fifth part of the population of London. To-day, thanks to improvements in sanitary conditions and scientific knowledge that march with advancing civilisation, it has become so rare in th’s country that an isolated case, such as has occurred in Liverpool, is accounted worthy of special mention. Like its cousin typhus, which raged through Eastern Europe immediately after the establishment of the Soviet Government and_ the demoralisation of all sanitary services that followed that calamity, it is vermin-borne. In the case of typhus, the germ is carried by the bocly-louss; in that of plague by the rat flea, an insect which also, on occasion, bites human beings, usually when the rat has died of plague and left the parasite cold and foodless. China and India have long been among the worst plague countries, and it is to the -systematic work of research and preventive medicine undertaken at the expense of the British Administration in Hongkong and the Indian Government that wo owe most of our knowledge of its causation and prevention. Inoculation with _ the serum devised by Professor Haffkine ; a scientist in the service of the Indian Government, diminished mortality in those-affected by at least half. The Suez Canal is now a guarded gate through which the plague bacillus cannot force it way. Every ship coming from an Oriental port_ is strictly examined there. Her captain must report any unusual mortality among rats, nmd each member of the ship’s company must be examined. All persons_ upon whom rests the slightest suspicion of infection are landed for a quarantine period in the dreary but necessary isolation of Mosss’ Wells. Such measures as this enable us to bei confident that the Black Death, the name of terror under wliich the plague nnr-o invaded Europe, will never again be known in the West so long as civilisation endures.