Plague
Subtitle: a story of science, rivalry, and the scourge that won't go away
By: Edward Marriott
Edition: 1st American ed
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
Published: 2003
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 302
Subjects: Plague -- History; Plague -- Hong Kong (China : Special Administrative Region) -- History -- 19th century
Work titles: Plague race
Description: In this recounting of medical and human history, Marriott takes us back to Hong Kong in the summer of 1894, when a diagnosis of plague brought two top scientists to the island--Alexandre Yersin, a lone, maverick French bacteriologist, and his eminent rival, the Japanese Shibasaburo Kitasato. Marriott interweaves his narrative of their competition to discover the plague's source with scenes of the scourge's persistence: California in 1900, when plague arrived in the United States; Surat, India, in 1994, where torrential floods drowned millions of rats, causing the worst outbreak in seventy years; and New York City, some time in the future, where there is a rat for every human being, a diminishing budget for pest control, and an emerging strain of plague that is resistant to antibiotics.--From publisher description.
Notes: Originally published: The plague race : United Kingdom : Picador, 2002

Includes bibliographical references (p. 283-292) and index