Plague may ravage world again in case of another world war

The third pandemic of plague raged within 1894 –1910. The disease made a round-the-world voyage thanks to transport. Plague hit countries and continents that had never known the disease before, Australia, Japan, South Africa and both Americas. In 1894, Alexandre Yersin in a small hospital in Hong Kong examined the dead bodies of people killed by plague and found out “little bacilli with rounded ends” in their ulcers.

At the very beginning of the pandemic six million people died of plague in India. Doctor P.L.Simond studied dead rats in a laboratory in Bombay and discovered that every rat carried plague bacilli and a huge number of fleas. The doctor said the fleas readily bit humans as well.

So, the centuries-old secret of plague was solved. Thanks to efforts of a great number of doctors and researchers the Black Death retreated. In the 1930s, pharmacists invented effective sulfa medications to treat plague and effective antibiotics against the disease appeared in the 1940s.

But still today researchers would not state that plague is defeated once and for all. It is difficult to diagnose plague at once as its initial stage resembles flu or any other virus infection. Tens of thousands of plague patients are registered worldwide every year; not more than 3-4 percent of cases are fatal today. But it is not ruled out that the ancient disease may break out if another world war begins or a large-scale cataclysm breaks the habitual course of life.

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