The black death

The evocative word plague (February 19) instils instantly in the human breast grave fear and great terror which it has caused perennially for countless ages past to mankind. We all have come across accounts of natural happenings or fictional literature about the Black Death pandemics in the Middle Ages, which decimated the human race.

The plague bacillus is carried by the millions of fleas which live on the skin of several species of rodent animals in many parts of the world. Hence, mankind is unable to eradicate this scourge of plague, as it has done in the case of that other great killer of mankind, the smallpox virus. Fortunately, it is nowadays easy to treat plague with antibiotics and equally easy to diagnose the disease from its signs and symptoms. The appearance of the enlarged lymphatic glands, in the groin, axilla, neck, the so-called Buboes, hence Bubonic plague, and its association with rodents has been noted correctly even in biblical times, see 1 Samuel 4-5-6, in the Philistine-Hebrew wars.

Unfortunately, the outbreak reported in The Times' foreign news columns is the worst type of plague, namely Pneumonic plague, which has a very short incubation period of 48 hours and a mortality of up to 100 per cent if not treated promptly. It is spread by infectious aerosol droplets directly from person to person and has broken out in a region of the Democratic Republic of Congo where medical facilities for the immediate isolation of patients and administration of appropriate drugs may not have been available.

To make matters worse, the populace in the affected area got scared and fled and scattered around, thus spreading new foci of infection. An ominous proceeding. No wonder the personnel of the UNO and the WHO and the Medicine sans Frontieres are worried about this latest epidemic.