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...

The environment and public health goals hold a common value of healthy populations. The threat of bioterrorism requires a partnership of both, building upon the long history of the link between public health and the environment. This existing relationship is key to an effective system of biodefense for the nation, because the use of biological weapons through every environmental pathway poses a...

Antimicrobial resistance in Yersinia pestis is rare, yet constitutes a significant international public health and biodefense threat. In 1995, the first multidrug resistant (MDR) isolate of Y. pestis (strain IP275) was identified, and was shown to contain a self-transmissible plasmid (pIP1202) that conferred resistance to many of the antimicrobials recommended for plague treatment and prophylax...

dealing in the busy and practical world with such a wide range of opinions; and second, the closing of the gulf of misunderstanding between the reforming organizations and orthodox medicine. Neither of these is insuperable; but the third, the increasing spectre of malpractice, may be. At all events, it is clear that histories of childbirth such as this one are not only motivated by, but essenti...

To the Editor: A scientifi c debate with public health implications wages: What caused the medieval European plague epidemics known as Black Death? Recent articles note inconsistencies between a rat fl ea– borne pandemic of Yersinia pestis (the bacterium that causes bubonic plague) and the documented characteristics of Black Death (1, among others). Ayyadurai et al. (2) acknowledge that a rat f...

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...

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...