The primary pneumonic plague outbreaks in Oakland in 1919 and Los Angeles in 1924 constitute good points of reference for epidemiological observations and experimental studies on this form of plague. Retrospective analysis of them reveals some still unanswered questions. In the Oakland outbreak (24), a man went hunting in the hills of Contra Costa County in April 1919 and perhaps took home a sq...

Small mammals play a role in plague transmission as hosts in all plague endemic areas. Information on distribution and diversity of small mammals is therefore important for plague surveillance and control in such areas. The objective of this study was to investigate small mammals' diversity and their distribution in plague endemic area in the West Usambara Mountains in north-eastern Tanzania. L...

In some rodent species frequently exposed to plague outbreaks caused by Yersinia pestis, resistance to the disease has evolved as a population trait. As a first step in determining if plague resistance has developed in black-tailed prairie dogs (Cynomys ludovicianus), animals captured from colonies in a plague-free region (South Dakota) and two plague-endemic regions (Colorado and Texas) were c...

Speculation on how the bacterium Yersinia pestis re-emerges after years of absence in the Prebalkhash region in Kazakhstan has been ongoing for half a century, but the mechanism is still unclear. One of the theories is that plague persists in its reservoir host (the great gerbil) in so-called hotspots, i.e. small regions in which the conditions remain favourable for plague to persist during tim...

Many infectious diseases were described in North Africa in 18th-19th centuries by European travellers. Most of them were allegedly imported by new migrant populations coming from sub-Saharan, European or Middle East countries. Plague outbreaks have been described since the Black Death as diseases of the Mediterranean harbours. Charles Nicolle and his collaborators at the Pasteur Institute were ...

Primary pneumonic plague is a well recognised form of the disease, but on account of its comparative rarity it has not attracted much attention and very little has been done to establish its bionomics and in particular its relationship to the more common bubonic variety of the disease. This is the more surprising since it presents certain well marked characteristics both clinical and epidemiolo...

The major objective of this work has been to learn the effect of plague toxin on several enzymatic systems in vitro. The availability of purified preparations of plague toxin (Ajl et al., 1955) permitted us to carry out these investigations. In this report, experiments are described in which purified plague toxin has been added to actively respiring cell-free extracts and crude mouse liver homo...

BACKGROUND Plague (Yersinia pestis infection) is a vector-borne disease which caused millions of human deaths in the Middle Ages. The hosts of plague are mostly rodents, and the disease is spread by the fleas that feed on them. Currently, the disease still circulates amongst sylvatic rodent populations all over the world, including great gerbil (Rhombomys opimus) populations in Central Asia. Gr...