The Great Plague. The Story of London\'s Most Deadly Year

278 • The Great Plague

visit to the Pasteur Institute in Paris the next year, he cultivated attenuated
bacilli and serum antibodies that became the source for future vaccines. He

returned to Indochina, established a local Pasteur Institute, and remained
there to the end of his life except for short trips to give lectures and accept
awards. In the summer of 1896 , his vaccine proved successful in countering a
fresh outbreak of plague in Hong Kong.^30

The race between these two great microbiologists in the climactic year of
1894 in Hong Kong had brought an outcome very different from the relief
measures undertaken by London’s plague fighters in 1665. Building on the
foundational work of Koch and Pasteur and the achievements of Yersin and

Kitasato, twentieth-century microbe hunters would go on to develop the
long-sought wonder drugs that could cure plague. The end of an ancient
scourge of humankind was at last clearly in sight.

Of Future Plagues

Plague will not be soon eradicated, despite the major advances made since the be-

ginning of [the twentieth] century in the knowledge of the disease, in public

health, and in therapy.

—Pasteur Institute, Paris, 1994

In 1995 Elisabeth Carniel and her colleagues at the Pasteur Institute in Paris
wrote that la peste d ’aujourd ’huicould be considered a reemerging disease.

Madagascar, one of the world’s persistent plague centers, averaged 1 , 250 cases
per year; in 2001 the figure rose to 2 , 000. In India a pulmonary epidemic in
1994 infected 876 humans.^31 Plague remains in our global village despite
public health measures and vaccines and antibiotics. Endemic foci of the

plague bacillus exist in Africa (Madagascar, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Tan-
zania, Kenya, Zaire, Botswana, and Uganda); Asia (Vietnam, China, India,
Mongolia, Kazakhstan, and Myanmar); South America (Bolivia, Brazil, and
Peru); and North America (California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Col-

orado, Oregon, and Idaho).^32 A mortality rate of 25 percent is not uncom-
mon in the western United States for unfortunate campers who pick up dead
rodents or place their sleeping bag near burrows harboring infected animals.
The human symptoms of modern plague are easily recognizable to trained

personnel with a checklist of signs, of which buboes are the most obvious.
The primary hosts vary considerably, mainly consisting of wild rodents. Sec-