Plague is an ancient, serious, infectious disease which is still endemic in regions of the modern world and is a potential biothreat agent. This paper discusses the natural history of the bacterium and its evolution into a flea-vectored bacterium able to transmit bubonic plague. It reviews the incidence of plague in the modern world and charts the history of vaccines which have been used to pro...

During 2004-2014, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) declared 54% of plague cases worldwide. Using national data, we characterized the epidemiology of human plague in DRC for this period. All 4,630 suspected human plague cases and 349 deaths recorded in DRC came from Orientale Province. Pneumonic plague cases (8.8% of total) occurred during 2 major outbreaks in mining camps in the equat...

Natural disasters have always been followed by a fear of infectious diseases. This raised historical debate about one of the most feared scenarios: the outbreak of bubonic plague caused by Yersinia pestis. One such event was recorded in the Indian state Maharashtra in 1994 after an earthquake. In multidisciplinary historical approach to the evolution of plague, many experts ignore the possibili...

As an ancient scourge, plague caused deadly epidemics in medieval Europe, and in the 20th century, it caused extensive mortality in India and Vietnam. Crossing into the 21st century, it has attracted particular attention as a potential bioweapon, for which a new vaccine needs to be developed. Human plague syndromes are mainly bubonic, septicemic, and pneumonic, all caused by the bacterium Yersi...

Plague is an endemic disease to the west of Iran and has frequently stricken this area over the last decades. In 1954, Pasteur Institute of Iran established a research station in the west of the country and since then has monitored the plague outbreaks as well as the disease status in rodents and carnivores by dispatching research teams to different villages and localities. We noticed that ther...

It is scarcely necessary to emphasize the .j important part played by fleas in the dissemina; tion of plague. The experimental researches of the Indian Plague Commission (1906) have definitely established the transmission of bubonic plague from rat to rat, from rat to man, and from man to man by the agency of rat fleas. Though over 25 species of Xcnopsylla are known to entomologists, only three...

OBJECTIVES Plague remains a public health concern worldwide, particularly in old foci. Multiple epidemics of this disease have been recorded throughout the history of Iran. Despite the long-standing history of human plague in Iran, it remains difficult to obtain an accurate overview of the history and current status of plague in Iran. METHODS In this review, available data and reports on case...

1. Outbreak of pneumonic plague in village Hatkoti, District Shimla, Himachal Pradesh, India, February 2002. New Delhi (India): Directorate General of Health Services, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare; April 30, 2002. 2. Dennis DT, Gage KL, Gratz N, Poland JD, Tikhomirov E. Plague manual: epidemiology, distribution, surveillance and control. Geneva: World Health Organization; (WHO/CDS/CSR/...

Yersinia pestis causes the fatal respiratory disease pneumonic plague. Y. pestis recently evolved from the gastrointestinal pathogen Y. pseudotuberculosis; however, it is not known at what point Y. pestis gained the ability to induce a fulminant pneumonia. Here we show that the acquisition of a single gene encoding the protease Pla was sufficient for the most ancestral, deeply rooted strains of...