Outbreak Of Bubonic Plague Research Articles

Epidemiological Regularities o f Plague in India and Substantiation of Measures on Sanitary Protection of Siberia and Far East Territories

Plague epidemiological situation in India in XX and at the beginning of XXI century is evaluated. The epidemic process is shown to have wavy interrupted course and is divided into periods of annual intensive epidemics, reduction of epidemic activity and sudden development of acute outbreaks on the background of sporadic morbidity absence. Brief characterization of a pulmonary plague epidemic in India in 1994 and undertaken international sanitary and protective measures by the example of Russian Federation and USA is presented. Local outbreaks of pulmonary and bubonic plague in 2002-2004 give evidence of periodically complicated epidemic situation in India. Trend and volume of measures on sanitary protection of territories are substantiated by development of commercial, economical, tourist communications between India and Russia including Regions of Siberian and Far Eastern Federal Districts differing by the degree of plague importation risk.

Alexandre Yersin (1863–1943): discoverer of the plague bacillus, explorer and agronomist

Alexandre Yersin was born in French Switzerland and later took French nationality. While a medical student he worked in Paris with Emile Roux to discover the exotoxin produced by the diphtheria bacillus. Two years after graduation, he left Paris for French Indochina where he was the first European to explore and map the central highlands of Vietnam. As a member of the French Colonial Health Service he was sent to Hong Kong in 1894 to investigate the outbreak of bubonic plague. He isolated from buboes the causative bacillus that later was named Yersinia pestis in his honour. In Vietnam, Yersin established a Pasteur Institute at the coastal village of Nha Trang where he lived for the rest of his life. He developed vaccines and antisera for both men and animals and, as an agronomist, he introduced the Brazilian rubber tree and Peruvian cinchona tree (for quinine) into the country. In Vietnam, as in France, the name of Yersin continues to be venerated.

Potential mammalian reservoirs in a bubonic plague outbreak focus in Mbulu District, northern Tanzania, in 2007

This study investigated mammalian involvement in an outbreak of bubonic plague in Mbulu District, northern Tanzania, in March 2007. Plague is a rodent-borne zoonotic disease that spreads to humans through fleas infected with Yersinia pestis. Live trapping of rodents and shrews was conducted in fallow and crop fields, peri-domestic areas, houses and the neighboring forest reserve. Serum was separated from blood of captured animals. A rapid diagnostic test (RDT) was used for diagnosis of plague infection. An ELISA technique was used to detect antibodies against Yersinia pestis fraction 1 antigen. Wild and commensal rodents tested positive by RDT, indicating current infection in clinically healthy animals. The ELISA showed that wild rodents (Lophuromys flavopunctatus, Praomys delectorum, Graphiurus murinus, Lemniscomys striatus) and commensal rats (Rattus rattus, Mastomys natalensis, Mus minutoides) were Y. pestis-positive. Two potential vectors, Xenopsylla brasiliensis and Dinopsyllus lypusus, were found on wild and commensal rodents with a flea index of 1.8. We conclude that diverse potential mammalian reservoirs and efficient vectors of Y. pestis are present in abundance in Dongobesh and could lead to persistence and future plague outbreaks.

Year of Wonders: The Wonder of Leadership

Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks paints a disturbing, realistic picture of life in a small village in England in the year 1666 during the outbreak of bubonic plague. The tale of the life of the villagers and how they cope with the plague provides a backdrop for the emergence of unlikely leaders, testing of the traditional leaders within the society and revealing the weaknesses that have the potential to emerge in any leader.This is an examination of the characters within the novel and how their leadership characteristics and skills emerge and are tested. A variety of leadership theories and concepts can be seen in the leaders within the novel, including trait and process leadership; assigned and emergent leadership; the concept of power in society; path-goal theory; and transformational leadership. In this article, several characters in the novel are identified as leaders. Each of these identified characters is examined in terms of leadership theory and concepts.

Mortality

Mortality

Florence Bretelle-Establet, La santé en Chine du sud (1898–1928), Collection Asie orientale, Paris, CNRS Editions, 2002, pp. xv, 239, illus., €30.00 (paperback 2-271-06010-9).

This French volume on health in southern China offers a valuable insight into the health matters of a little studied area of China during a period of great chaos. It traces the decay of the Qing empire from 1898 to its collapse in 1911, followed by some years of warlord rule until a centralized Chinese government was reinstated under the Nationalist Party in 1928. It also chronicles how rapacious imperial powers carved out areas of preferential trading rights across Chinese territory. While never ceding direct rule to any foreign power, by the turn of the twentieth century the disintegrating Qing empire had granted France concession areas in six major Chinese cities in the three southern provinces of Yunnan, Guangxi and Guangzhou. Bretelle-Establet focuses in particular on the south-western province of Yunnan, where the French imperialist effort was concentrated because of its juxtaposition to Indochina. After the outbreak of bubonic plague in Guangdong and Hong Kong in 1894, it became obvious to the French colonial authorities that the health situation in China needed to be carefully monitored if its settler population was to be protected and if disease was to be prevented from travelling along the expanding trade routes to Indochina. After the First World War, however, France's strength as an imperial power waned and those medical officers who remained in China had to turn from charitable medical activities to more lucrative private practice. This meant that their role shifted from one of observation of Chinese medical practices to a degree of participation with them. Bretelle-Establet is keen to point out that the type of doctor entering China in the late nineteenth century was, unlike his predecessor whose movements were confined to the coasts, a graduate of the Pasteurian school and of the scientific sort. She juxtaposes his viewpoint with the state of medicine and health relief in southern China at that time. Here Bretelle-Establet offers a thorough account of the diseases prevalent in the region, the way in which local doctors approached them and the state institutions in place to deal with them. While stopping short of providing a distinctive Chinese medicine of the south-west, mainly due to a lack of comparison with medicine in other areas, Bretelle-Establet is successful in displaying some general trends in regional medical practice which will be of interest to other historians of Chinese medicine of the period. Bretelle-Establet bases her study on a number of original primary sources. These include the sanitary correspondences of French medical officers, held mainly in the archives of overseas records in Aix-en-Provence, complemented by reports from medical missionaries based in the south-west. She also uses a variety of local Chinese prefectural gazetteers along with a handful of high-profile medical writings by doctors of the south-west. Bretelle-Establet displays a clear understanding of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century history of European medicine as well as a good command of the classical Chinese sources. If I do have a criticism it is that this history is perhaps too French in its orientation. Alphonse Laveran plays a centre role in the background to the history of malaria, but there is no mention of Patrick Manson, a man who spent some twenty years researching in south-east China. There are also a number of English-language works that would have assisted in the analysis of trends in nineteenth-century Chinese medicine but which appear to have gone unnoticed, such as Chao Yuan-ling's study of physicians in Suzhou and Ruth Rogaski's work on health and hygiene in treaty port Tianjin over a similar time period. There is no doubt that this is a welcome contribution to the recent history of medicine in China. Well-researched and well-illustrated with a number of helpful tables and maps, Bretelle-Establet does a masterful job of uniting French and Chinese viewpoints on health and disease.

Unwanted guests: The miseries, the dangers and the glorious future of biting insects and vector-borne diseases in New South Wales

Insects have an infinite talent to annoy, and as vectors of disease they have had a decisive effect on human affairs, determining the fates of cities and armies, religions and nations. The outbreak of bubonic plague in Europe during the 14th century is considered an important contributor to the demise of feudalism. Convocations of the College of Cardinals in Rome were regularly disrupted by mortality from the mal aria (literally, the 'bad air') of the Pontine Marshes. Napoleon lured an English army into the malarial swamps of Les Pays-Bas (The Netherlands) to effect a famous victory. In history, vectorborne diseases have been the constant and unwanted companions of new settlers, the adventurous, the poor, and marching armies and pilgrims.

The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era Began Thousands of Years Ago

The anthropogenic era is generally thought to have begun 150 to 200 years ago, when the industrial revolution began producing CO2 andCH4 at rates sufficient to alter their compositions in the atmosphere. A different hypothesis is posed here: anthropogenic emissions of these gases first altered atmospheric concentrations thousands of years ago. This hypothesis is based on three arguments. (1) Cyclic variations in CO2 andCH4 driven by Earth-orbital changes during the last 350,000 years predict decreases throughout the Holocene, but the CO2 trend began ananomalous increase 8000 years ago, and the CH4 trend did so 5000 years ago.(2) Published explanations for these mid- to late-Holocene gas increases basedon natural forcing can be rejected based on paleoclimatic evidence. (3) A wide array of archeological, cultural, historical and geologic evidence points to viable explanations tied to anthropogenic changes resulting from early agriculture in Eurasia, including the start of forest clearance by 8000 years ago and of rice irrigation by 5000 years ago. In recent millennia, the estimated warming caused by these early gas emissions reached a global-mean value of ∼ 0.8 °C and roughly 2 °C at high latitudes, large enough to have stopped a glaciation of northeastern Canada predicted by two kinds of climatic models. CO2 oscillations of ∼ 10 ppm in the last 1000 years are toolarge to be explained by external (solar-volcanic) forcing, but they can be explained by outbreaks of bubonic plague that caused historically documented farm abandonment in western Eurasia. Forest regrowth on abandoned farms sequestered enough carbon to account for the observed CO2decreases. Plague-driven CO2 changes were also a significant causal factor in temperature changes during the Little Ice Age (1300–1900 AD).

The Return of the Epidemics: Health and Society in Peru during the Twentieth Century

Marcos Cueto begins his excellent book on epidemic disease in twentieth-century Peru by examining the outbreak of bubonic plague that occurred in the early 1900s and ends it with an analysis of the cholera epidemic of 1991. These two essays clearly demonstrate both the connections between poverty and disease and the inadequacies of the Peruvian public health system. Bubonic plague, which was first diagnosed in coastal Peru in 1903, was a disease of the poor, who lived in flimsy houses easily invaded by rats. Cholera, which spread all over Latin America in the 1990s, likewise primarily affected the poor, who lived in areas without safe drinking water or proper sewage systems. In both cases, official discourse and popular belief saw the epidemic not as the fault of the state, which failed to provide minimal, healthful living conditions for its citizens, but as the fault of the afflicted. Contracting plague or cholera was associated with being lower class, dirty, ignorant, and lazy. This led people to hide the sick and delay treatment out of shame. The thing that makes Cueto’s comparison of these two epidemics even sadder is that in the early twentieth century, despite the tendency to blame the poor for the disease, plague at least became the impetus for the state’s reluctant acceptance of responsibility for public health. In the 1990s, on the other hand, while heroic efforts on the part of medical professionals managed to keep the mortality rate for cholera low, Peru’s public health system was grossly underfunded, and a neoliberal government promoted the idea that medical care was an individual responsibility.Other essays in the book reveal different responses to epidemics in Peru: the autocratic nature of the campaign against yellow fever led in the 1920s by Henry Hanson and the Rockefeller Foundation and supported by the modernizing Leguía regime; the government’s belated response to malaria in the south in the 1930s followed by massive, but ultimately unsuccessful, efforts to eliminate it completely between the 1940s and the 1970s; and the fascinating story of Dr. Manuel Núñez Butrón, who created sanitary brigades to fight smallpox and typhus in the southern Andean department of Puno. By linking public health to respect for native culture and the struggle of Andean communities to retain their lands, Indian sanitary workers were able to educate many rural people about typhus and encourage them to voluntarily accept vaccination against smallpox. The embrace of indigenismo by local intellectuals, the presence of Indian members of the Seventh Day Adventist Church who were interested in health and education, and Núñez Butrón’s ability to work with local healers combined to make the 1930s campaign in Puno successful, albeit short lived. Núñez Butrón’s effort to introduce Western medicine in the interest of defending the Indian stands out as a positive alternative to the coercive approaches generally used.The Spanish version of The Return of the Epidemics received the Latin American Studies Association’s “Premio Iberoamericano” in 1998, and its translation is a welcome addition to the English-language literature on public health and the history of medicine. It is also an important book for anyone who wants to understand the reality of modern Peru, because once again Cueto shows that the history of medicine provides new vantage points for understanding political and social change. Cueto ends the book with a call for governments to assume responsibility for public health “because it gives citizens a feeling of security, hope, order, and equal opportunities” (p. 141). He also calls for an engaged approach to the history of medicine that considers the beliefs and opinions of ordinary people as well as doctors, which can “help strengthen the elements of solidarity, integration, and equality . . . as well as break the vicious circle of poverty and disease that regularly comes back to Peru as an epidemic” (p. 141). The Return of the Epidemics is an excellent example of just this type of history.

Effect of the bubonic plague epidemic on inbreeding in 14th century Britain.

The purpose of the study reported here was to further investigate a new method of estimating inbreeding in large, relatively isolated populations over historic times, as reported by Pattison (1999, 2001). The method is based on modeling the genealogical "paradox" and produces values of Pearl's coefficients of inbreeding as a function of time for any given population curve. In particular, this study demonstrates that the new method of estimating inbreeding may be used to examine the effect of unusual features in population curves on levels of inbreeding in that population. As an example, the medieval population "bump" that spans the 13th and 14th centuries in the population of Britain, which terminated abruptly with the outbreak of bubonic plague in 1348 AD, is examined. It is first assumed that the whole population was the adult (breeding) population, corresponding to minimum inbreeding. For this case it is found that, for distant generations, about 90% of the whole population occurs in any present-day British pedigree. This value compares favorably with the values of 85% and 80% reported by Wachter (1980) and Derrida et al. (1999, 2000), respectively. The population bump causes the curves for Pearl's coefficient, for minimum inbreeding, to have a plateau of about 96% over the period from about 1220 AD to 1380 AD. The effect of introducing a single known estimate of inbreeding into the model is to produce a more realistic situation where the adult (breeding) population is considerably less than the whole population. It is found that the maximum number of different ancestors in any generation, in the average British pedigree, is about 22900 individuals and occurs about 1220 AD. More importantly, and possibly contrary to expectation, it is now found that the population bump had virtually no effect on the level of inbreeding.

The temporal dynamics of the fourteenth-century Black Death: new evidence from English ecclesiastical records.

Recent research has questioned whether the European Black Death of 1347-1351 could possibly have been caused by the bubonic plague bacillus Yersinia pestis, as has been assumed for over a century. Central to the arguments both for and against involvement of Y. pestis has been a comparison of the temporal dynamics observed in confirmed outbreaks of bubonic plague in early-20th-century India, versus those reconstructed for the Black Death from English church records--specifically, from lists of institutions (appointments) to vacated benefices contained in surviving bishops' registers. This comparison is, however, based on a statistical error arising from the fact that most of the bishops' registers give only the dates of institution and not the dates of death. Failure to correct for a distributed (as opposed to constant) lag time from death to institution has made it look as if the Black Death passed slowly through specific localities. This error is compounded by a failure to disaggregate the information from the bishops' registers to a geographical level that is genuinely comparable to the modern data. A sample of 235 deaths from the bishop's register of Coventry and Lichfield, the only English register to list both date of death and date of institution, shows that the Black Death swept through local areas much more rapidly than has previously been thought. This finding is consistent with those of earlier studies showing that the Black Death spread too rapidly between locales to have been a zoonosis such as bubonic plague. A further analysis of the determinants of the lag between death and institution, designed to provide a basis for reexamining other bishops' registers that do not provide information on date of death, shows that the distribution of lags could vary significantly by time and space even during a single epidemic outbreak.

The Justinianic plague: origins and effects

This article addresses the subject of the first well-attested outbreak of bubonic plague in the history of the Mediterranean world – the so-called ‘Justinianic Plague’ of the sixth century. The African origin of the disease is examined and contextualized, whilst recent revisionist arguments in relation to the scale of the depopulation caused by the plague are responded to with reference to the numismatic, legal, and papyrological sources. The numismatic evidence in particular points to a major crisis in imperial finances for which large-scale depopulation would be the most likely cause. The legal and papyrological sources record how both landowners and the imperial authorities responded to this situation.

Betrayal of Trust

Betrayal of Trust

Epidemiologic features of four successive annual outbreaks of bubonic plague in Mahajanga, Madagascar.

From 1995 to 1998, outbreaks of bubonic plague occurred annually in the coastal city of Mahajanga, Madagascar. A total of 1,702 clinically suspected cases of bubonic plague were reported, including 515 laboratory confirmed by Yersinia pestis isolation (297), enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, or both. Incidence was higher in males and young persons. Most buboes were inguinal, but children had a higher frequency of cervical or axillary buboes. Among laboratory-confirmed hospitalized patients, the case-fatality rate was 7.9%, although all Y. pestis isolates were sensitive to streptomycin, the recommended antibiotic. In this tropical city, plague outbreaks occur during the dry and cool season. Most cases are concentrated in the same crowded and insanitary districts, a result of close contact among humans, rats, and shrews. Plague remains an important public health problem in Madagascar, and the potential is substantial for spread to other coastal cities and abroad.

Biology of Plagues: Evidence from Historical Populations (review)

The names of Susan Scott and Christopher Duncan need no introduction for those of us interested in time series analysis of epidemics. Indeed, their 1998 book titled Human Demography and Disease is an excellent source on spectral analysis of time series, one that I consult frequently. However, the title of their newest book, Biology of Plagues, is somewhatmisleading, since it deals with epidemics during a specific time and place, namely, Western Europe from 1300 to the 1660s. Even so, the authors present a persuasive and well-documented case that these epidemics were not outbreaks of bubonic plague, as has been assumed in the past.

Biology of plagues: evidence from historical populations

The threat of unstoppable plagues, such as AIDS and Ebola, is always with us. In Europe, the most devastating plagues were those from the Black Death pandemic in the 1300s to the Great Plague of London in 1665. For the last 100 years, it has been accepted that Yersinia pestis, the infective agent of bubonic plague, was responsible for these epidemics. This book combines modern concepts of epidemiology and molecular biology with computer-modelling. Applying these to the analysis of historical epidemics, the authors show that they were not, in fact, outbreaks of bubonic plague. Biology of Plagues offers a completely new interdisciplinary interpretation of the plagues of Europe and establishes them within a geographical, historical and demographic framework. This fascinating detective work will be of interest to readers in the social and biological sciences, and lessons learnt will underline the implications of historical plagues for modern-day epidemiology.

Outbreak of bubonic plague in Jacocha, Huancabamba, Perú

Climatic alterations arising in the north of Perú as a result of the El Niño phenomenon (ENSO) have caused variations in the crop volume, changes in the direction of rivers and probably an increase in the rodent population. In February 1999, in a native community in Jacocha, Huancabamba, Piura's mountains, Perú, an outbreak of bubonic plague appeared with five human cases, one of which lead to death. The diagnosis was confirmed by serology (passive hemaglutination). The presence of antibodies in dogs of localities close to Jacocha has confirmed the circulation of Yersinia pestis in the region. The outbreak was controlled by the local sanitary authorities' prompt action. This episode, after an epidemiological silence for more than four years, showed the necessity of intensifying the plague epidemiological surveillance system in this area.

Entomological and rodent surveillance in plague-suspected areas during September 1994 and thereafter.

Studies carried out in the states of Maharashtra, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh and Union Territory of Delhi after the bubonic plague outbreak during 1994 revealed the presence of seven species of rodents, viz. Rattus rattus, R. norvegicus, Mus. musculus, Tatera indica, Suncus murinus, Bandicoota bengalensis and B. indica. The flea species encountered were Xenopsylla cheopis and X. astia. The X. cheopis and X. astia index recorded in different areas of Beed district of Maharashtra; Surat, Vadodra and Baruch districts in Gujarat and Varanasi district in Uttar Pradesh and their implications have been discussed. Insecticide suspectibility tests carried out against DDT, dieldrin, malathion and deltamethrin with X. cheopis collected from Maharashtra, Delhi and Varanasi revealed that this vector species is resistant to DDT and dieldrin but susceptible to malathion and deltamethrin. The prevalence and distribution of rodents species, high cheopis index and prevalence of Tatera indica just at the door steps of houses in village Mamla of Beed district provides highly congenital conditions for the intermingling of wild and domestic rodents and transfer of flea population from wild to domestic rodents and vice-versa. These conditions were found to be highly supportive for bubonic plague transmission in the district. The presence of Yersinia pestis antibodies in Rattus rattus collected from Beed, Surat and Varanasi areas are also indicative of bubonic plague in Beed and Varanasi and pneumonic plague in Surat during 1994.

Plague in India

EDITOR, - D T Dennis's editorial on lessons to be learnt from the outbreak of bubonic and pneumonic plague in Maharashtra and Gujurat, India, points towards maintenance of the public health infrastructure to detect, monitor, and combat different agents of disease.1 That would not be feasible without sound laboratory support in developing countries where government expenditure on drugs is less than five cents per person and health posts run out of their annual supplies of drugs during the early part of the fiscal year.2 …

Plague in India

After decades with no confirmed human plague in India, health authorities there are simultaneously responding to outbreaks of bubonic and pneumonic plague in rural and urban populations of the south central and southwestern states of Maharashtra and Gujurat. A major concern is the spread of disease by travellers from these epidemic foci.1 Worldwide, public health authorities have been trying to prevent the introduction of pneumonic plague within their borders, requiring national disease surveillance and quarantine offices to operate on emergency schedules dealing with a situation with which almost none has any first hand experience.2 Public fascination, confusion, and incredulity have been fuelled by press reports. A mass exodus including hospital patients and even staff themselves has occurred from the epicentre of the outbreak of pneumonic plague despite regular pronouncements by the medical community that plague is readily treated with antibiotics. Assurances of the effectiveness of public health measures have seemed incongruous given the explosive spread of disease, which authorities have been slow to confirm and explain. Doctors and public health workers have quickly tried to educate themselves about a disease they had long considered in the past tense. And everyone asks, “How could this happen?” Plague is caused by infection with Yersinia pestis, a bacterium carried by rodents and transmitted by fleas in parts of Asia, Africa, and the Americas.2 India was one of the countries most affected by the pandemic of plague that began in the latter half of the 19th century, experiencing an estimated 12.5 million deaths during 1889-1950.4 In recent decades plague in India and elsewhere has retreated to rural, natural foci of infection involving …