Bubonic plauge has killed 30 Zambians this year, largely because they were given the wrong medication. No more deaths are being recorded, according to Zambian ministry of health spokesman Dr Ben Phiri. When the first reports of an unusual disease outbreak were received on Jan. 24, health authorities established treatment centres in the outbreak focus in Kantengwa and satellite centres in Makobo, Chilala and Kabulamwanda. Drugs, medical supplies and protective material were dispatched to the affected area, patient contacts followed up and treated, infected households were disinfected and rodents and fleas destroyed.
Bubonic plague is transmitted by the rat flea.
It is the mildest of three clinical forms of the disease, the other two being pneumonic and septicemic plague. The Great Plague of London in 1664-65 resulted in more than 70,000 deaths in a population estimated at 460,000. And in 1894 an outbreak in Canton and Hong Kong killed 100,000 spreading over the next 20 years from the southern Chinese ports throughout the world and resulting in more than 10 million deaths. Usually, plague is a disease of rodents, but when an outbreak reduces the rodent population in the vicinity of human habitation fleas from the dead animals are unable to find another rodent host and begin to infest man. In Zambia, infected dead rats have been found in boreholes and in water drawn from wells.