Plague | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

Symptoms include swollen lymph glands, fever, headache, chills, and weakness.

Pneumonic plague, which infects a person through the lungs. It can be spread in the air from person to person. Symptoms include fever, headache, weakness, shortness of breath, chest pain, cough, and pneumonia.

Septicemic plague, which occur when plague bacteria multiply in the blood. It can occur by itself or be a complication of pneumonic or bubonic plague. It is not spread from person to person. Symptoms include fever, chills, exhaustion, abdominal pain, shock, and bleeding into the skin and other organs.

To reduce the chance of death, people with plague must receive antibiotics within 24 hours after the first symptoms appear. Effective antibiotics include streptomycin, gentamicin, and tetracycline. Early treatment allows most people with plague to be cured if diagnosed in time. There is no vaccine against plague available.

From 1954 to 1997, there were 80,613 reported plague cases in 38 countries, of which 6,587 people died, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). The highest number of cases, 6,004, occurred in 1967, and the lowest number, 200, occurred in 1981. These numbers likely represent only about a third of the actual number of cases, due to inadequate surveillance and reporting methods, according to WHO.

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