Abstract
THE recent epidemic of plague in northern China with its 60,000 deaths, is remarkable in two respects. First it was the most extensive manifestation of pneumonic plague in this pandemic; and, secondly, it was characterised by a more or less sudden cessation. It affords a warning as to the capabilities of the disease, and as to one of its possible developments, and although the outbreak has come to an end for the time being without any great efforts in the direction of prevention, yet it has demonstrated that the plague of the present day is as powerful for mischief and as capricious in action as that of any period in the past centuries. Arising in or close to eastern Mongolia, where the ordinary annual epidemics of plague have for many years shown a tendency to a comparatively high percentage of the pneumonic type, this influenzal form, shorn of the bubonic variety which has hitherto accompanied it and has been its predominant partner, appears, to have been conveyed as early as October, 1910, to some of the more recent settlements on the Man-churian portion of the Trans-Siberian Railway.
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SIMPSON, W. Plague . Nature 86, 486–487 (1911). https://doi.org/10.1038/086486a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/086486a0