-----Original Message-----
From: jim rawls [mailto:jazzpiano@ca.rr.com]
Sent: Tuesday, March 26, 2013 9:08 PM
To: californiasearthquakeforum@yahoogroups.com
Subject: A Science oddity, bubonic plague hits San Francisco, 1900 1909 from WGBH
in Boston.
Hi All,
I found this on the net, and thought it might prove interesting to read, about
bubonic pleague.
Jim
Bubonic plague hits San Francisco
1900 - 1909
Photo: Rat Receiving Station set up as part of the War on Rats led by the U.S.
Public Health Service. Millions of rats were killed and in 2 months no new cases of
plague were reported.
Bubonic plague, or "the black death," had raged throughout Europe and Asia over the
past centuries. In the twentieth century, it came to America.
In the summer of 1899, a ship sailing from Hong Kong to San Francisco had had two
cases of plague on board. Because of this, although no passengers were ill when the
ship reached San Francisco, it was to be quarantined on Angel Island. When the boat
was searched, 11 stowaways were found -- the next day two were missing. Their
bodies were later found in the Bay, and autopsy showed they contained plague
bacilli. Despite this scare, there was no immediate outbreak of disease. But rats
from the ship probably had something to do with the epidemic that hit San Francisco
nine months later.
On March 6, 1900, a city health officer autopsied a deceased Chinese man and found
organisms in the body that looked like plague. In 1894, two research physicians had
simultaneously and independently identified the bacillus that causes bubonic
plague. Shibasaburo Kitasato published his findings in Japanese and English;
Alexandre Yersin published in French. People in different parts of the world
credited one or the other with the discovery, depending which journals they had
read. (Since 1970 the bacillus has been known as Yersinia pestis.) That the plague
had an identifiable "germ" was known. But other recent findings had not been
disseminated -- or believed. Most people felt that the germ infected humans through
food or open wounds. Disinfection campaigns were the order of the day. In some
places they ran carbolic acid through sewers, actually spreading the disease faster
because it flushed out rats that had lived there.
Back in San Francisco, however, political issues vied with scientific efforts.
Anti-Chinese feeling ran strong in the city then, and the first step taken was to
quarantine Chinatown. The Chinese objected, and so did the business community. Not
because they wanted to protect the rights of the Chinese, but it was bad for
business to have people thinking there was plague in their city or state. The
quarantine was lifted but health officials ran house-to-house inspections of
Chinatown. People resisted, hiding their dead and locking their doors. But two more
plague victims turned up. The city Board of Health officially announced that plague
was present in the city. The governor refused to believe it or to do anything to
help in the antiplague effort. The Surgeon General got permission from President
McKinley to pass antiplague regulations. Others still denied the existence of
plague, although more and more states in the country were stopping trade with
California.
Commissions and boards formed, fought with the governor, and were disbanded,
underfunded, and reformed. Meanwhile, more plague cases were found. In April 1901,
a clean-up campaign of Chinatown was undertaken, scouring almost 1,200 houses and
14,000 rooms. In 1903, a new governor took office and vowed to help the boards of
health in every way. On February 29, 1904, a woman in the town of Concord,
California, died of plague, its last victim -- for a while. There had been 121
cases in San Francisco and 5 outside, with 122 deaths.
Knowledge, like illness, spreads. In the next few years, information about the
plague's causes and transmission would be clarified. In 1894, physician Mary Miles
in Canton, China, had reported the widespread death of rats in plague epidemics.
But people assumed the rats caught the disease from humans. In 1897, Japanese
physician Masanori Ogata wrote "one should pay attention to insects like fleas for,
as the rat becomes cold after death, they leave their host and may transmit the
plague virus directly to man." Paul Louis Simmond put all the accumulated
observations together, made his own observations (societal and microscopic), and
experimented with the bacillus, rats, and fleas. He proved that rat fleas bit
people (which went against received wisdom), and that a sick animal could not
transmit the disease if it didn't have fleas. Simmond published his conclusions in
1898 and was roundly ridiculed. But in 1905, a British commission published some of
the same findings and in 1908, issued a report confirming all of Simmond's
conclusions (though not crediting him).
In 1906, an earthquake of record proportions devastated San Francisco. The ruin of
the city's buildings made not just people, but rats, homeless. The subsequent year
or two of living in refugee camps while rebuilding was highly conducive to rat and
flea infestations. In 1907, cases of plague were reported. But with hindsight on
the last epidemic and new knowledge from research, officials launched a new kind of
campaign. They offered a bounty on rats. A similar rat-catching campaign had been
used successfully to fight plague in New Orleans. It worked as well in San
Francisco, and though this second epidemic was stronger than the first, it was
brought to halt in 1909.
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