Bubonic Plague

When women in long dresses and men in black ties ambled to the post office in days of old, they sometimes found their letters with holes in them or their envelopes browned from smoke or covered in the peculiar smell of some nasty chemical. Far from...

In the summer of 1918, as tuberculosis, bubonic plague and a flu pandemic threatened America's newly crowded cities, the chemist Charles Holmes Herty took a walk through New York City with his colleague J.R. Bailey. Herty posed a question: Suppose...

New walls have sprung up around Paul Keim's workplace to safeguard the deadly vials kept within it. He has new keys, an electronic security card--even bought his first pager so he'll always be reachable. The reason is anthrax. The lanky, bespectacled...

Dr. Solbert Permutt is a giant in the world of lung research, a gregarious, outspoken 76-year- old professor with the enthusiasm of a teen-ager, a flamboyant taste for large bow ties and a history of teaching generations of doctors at Johns Hopkins...

Thandiwe Mwandla can't give her sugar cane away these days, much less sell it. The same goes for her sweet bananas and corn and the hard little peaches that grow in her garden. The fruit has AIDS, people say. Switching from farmer to tailor, Mwandla, 45,...

BEIJING -- The Chinese government locked down a remote farming town after 3 people died and 10 more were sickened with pneumonic plague, a lung infection that can kill a human in 24 hours if left untreated. Police set up checkpoints around Ziketan, a...