Excerpt from Annual Report of the Department of Public Health: For the Year Ending November 30, 1920 Meanwhile modern sanitary science has discovered the method of transmission and has found that plague is essentially a disease of rats and only spreads to man where man lives in close association with rats. Moreover, it has been demonstrated that it is possible by definite measures directed against the rat to minimize the prob ability of the spread Of infection and to eradicate it if found in sea ports before it becomes sufficiently extensive in rats to be a serious human menace. Plague first manifested itself in this country in San Francisco nearly twenty years ago. After a period extending over several years in which the local commercial interests, medical authorities, political agencies and press all joined in a remarkable campaign of denial, cases of this disease, following the great disaster of 1906, assumed a degree of frequency and deadliness where evasion or denial were no longer possible. Then, by a remarkable campaign conducted by Federal, State and city health authorities, with all the civic bodies of State and city actively co-operating, the disease was completely eradicated from San Francisco within three years. In 1914 the port of New Orleans became infected. After an appar ently successful campaign of eradication plague again appeared in that city in November, 1919. This resulted in a much more thorough rat eradication program being put into force with apparently prompt success. But this summer numerous human cases appeared suddenly in three other seaports, - Galveston and Beaumont, Texas, and Pensacola, Fla. Systematic rat catching and laboratory examination of rat corpses revealed extensive rat plague in all these cities. The control methods promptly put into effect have resulted in apparent control of the situation in each city. At the same time alarming though Obscure reports have come of plague being present and more or less concealed in many places in Europe. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.