This anomaly, though already known has received little attention;1 neither Ziegler nor Gottfried, writing in 1969 and 1983 respectively, questioned the bubonic plague assumption.2 Shrewsbury’s detailed history of bubonic plague in the British Isles in 1971 did little to explore the problems of plague in a cold temperate climate.3 Indeed, so fixed was he upon the rat-flea plague model that he di...

Yersinia pestis, the causative agent of plague, is an emerging threat as a means of bioterrorism. Accordingly, the Working Group on Civilian Biodefense, as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has specified Y. pestis as a prime candidate for use in bioterrorism. As the threat of bioterrorism increases, so does the need for an effective vaccine against this potential agent. Ex...

HE Chinese winter of 1910-1911 was one of death and discontent: an epidemic of pneumonic plague—the greatest since the Black Death of the fourteenth century—scourged China's three Eastern Provinces (Manchuria), and famine afflicted the Central Provinces. The Manchurian plague claimed some fifty thousand lives in four months, and the famine took thousands more. Not all the hungry died, but no on...

Seventeenth-century medical theory saw epidemic diseases like the plague as being caused by stinking miasmas resulting from putrefying matter polluting the air. The butchers’ trade was singled out in London as a major polluter, implicated in both the regulatory literature and popular images as corrupting both the physical and moral health of the City and its citizens. Controlling the food trade...

Plague is an exotic vector-borne disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis that causes mortality rates approaching 100% in black-tailed prairie dogs (Cynomys ludovicianus). We mapped the perimeter of the active portions of black-tailed prairie dog colonies annually between 1999 and 2005 at four prairie dog colony complexes in areas with a history of plague, as well as at two complexes tha...

with moribund cases, who were beyond reach of all human help, and with convalescent and semi-convalescent cases being excluded. It was found that the rate of recovery could be doubled in acute and fit cases with the use of serum therapy. In his letter to the Lancet, Choksy contended that there had been no reason for dissatisfaction with Lustig's serum, in the 2 years of its application by him. ...

UNLABELLED A cluster of human plague cases occurred in the seaport city of Mahajanga, Madagascar, from 1991 to 1999 following 62 years with no evidence of plague, which offered insights into plague pathogen dynamics in an urban environment. We analyzed a set of 44 Mahajanga isolates from this 9-year outbreak, as well as an additional 218 Malagasy isolates from the highland foci. We sequenced th...

Plague is an exceptionally virulent fl ea-borne illness caused by the gram-negative bacterium Yersinia pestis (Prentice and Rahalison 2007 ). Humans are accidental hosts of this bacterium, which normally circulates among certain rodent species and their fl eas, occasionally causing widespread plague epizootics with high mortality among its hosts. Most people have little knowledge of plague’s st...