The bacterium Yersinia pestis causes bubonic plague. In Central Asia, where human plague is still reported regularly, the bacterium is common in natural populations of great gerbils. By using field data from 1949-1995 and previously undescribed statistical techniques, we show that Y. pestis prevalence in gerbils increases with warmer springs and wetter summers: A 1 degrees C increase in spring ...

This is a report on 2 cases of plaguemeningitis observed by us among the comparatively small material of 41 instances of plague treated at Wellington, Nilgiris, in 1945-46. We consider our cases worthy of record as the cerebro-spinal type of plague has been described in very few instances only, the disease being believed to be of extreme rarity. Lewillon, Devignat and Schoetter (1940) reported ...

Abstract This article examines the expansion of plague hospitals in early modern France. It shows that development these institutions was an urban initiative and there only limited involvement from crown before mid-seventeenth century. While is a typically highly negative view French hospitals, with being seen as death traps where infected were simply sent to die, they played vital role providi...

INTRODUCTION From an epidemiological point of view, the plague is still being considered of great importance, because of its high epidemic potential. Despite the absence of cases of human plague in Brazil, its etiologic agent, the bacteria Yersinia pestis, is still deep rooted in its natural environment. The occurrence of positive serology for plague in domestic carnivores in plague areas in Ba...

From 1996 to 1998, 5,965 patients with suspected plague were identified in 38 districts of Madagascar (40% of the total population are exposed). Using standard bacteriology, 917 of them were confirmed or presumptive (C + P) cases. However, more than 2,000 plague cases could be estimated using F1 antigen assay. Two out of the 711 Yersinia pestis isolates tested were resistant to chloramphenicol ...

Yersinia pestis, the highly virulent agent of plague, is a biological weapon. Strategies that prevent plague have been sought for centuries, and immunization with live, attenuated (nonpigmented) strains or subunit vaccines with F1 (Caf1) antigen is considered effective. We show here that immunization with live, attenuated strains generates plague-protective immunity and humoral immune responses...

During the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, several waves of a plague killed an estimated one-third of the civilian Athenian population and one-fourth of its army. Thucydides account of the plague (430-426 BCE) and the subsequent rise of the cult of Asclepius can be examined as perhaps the earliest case study of collective behavior and a social movement. In his account of the plague...

An application of the agar-gel precipitin-inhibition technique we described previously can be used to detect plague antibodies in human and animal sera after a series of plague vaccine inoculations or after exposure to Pasteurella pestis. Determination of the minimal reacting concentrations of the plague antigen and antibody reagents, methods for combining reagents, and length of incubation per...