266 PUBLIC HEALTH BACTERIOLOGY 



The rest of the family escaped. The same autumn a railway 

 guard who had caught marmots, and a woman who had 

 skinned them, both died of a disease resembling bubonic 

 plague. In the guard, typical bacilli were found. A 

 history of ten outbreaks in nine years in the district around 

 one railway station was elicited. Various other localized 

 outbreaks were reported, all tending to show that plague 

 was not new to the districts where Mongolia, Manchuria, 

 and Siberia adjoin. 



Spread. Beginning then in the north-west borders of 

 Manchuria among the marmot hunters, it was carried by 

 these in travelling back to their homes, many of them 

 having come from the Shantung province, south of Peking. 

 In the third week of October, 1910, about 10,000 of these 

 men had gathered in Manchourie and Khailar, stations on 

 the Vladivostock railway, waiting to sell the skins they 

 had gathered and to return to the south for the winter and 

 the new year festival. Cases of illness occurred here, with 

 symptoms of headache, fever, spitting of blood-coloured 

 sputum, and followed by rapid death. Apparently in spite 

 of the risks not many hunters die on the plains ; but 

 when crowded into the poor hovels or inns of the market- 

 towns, where, in small badly ventilated rooms, twenty to 

 forty may be found living, sleeping, and eating beside piles 

 of raw pelts the conditions for the encouragement of 

 any epidemic disease are ideal. From these foci the 

 infection spread by railway trains in which the hunters 

 were carried to Harbin, then south to Chang-chun, thence 

 to Mukden, on to Tientsin, and from there to their home 

 villages in the Shantung province ; and also by foot 

 travellers who struck across country through Kirin city 

 {eighty miles from a railway) to Dalny, and thence by 

 boat to Chef 00, a port in the Shantung province. All 

 the way men were falling ill and dying, and the sick 

 and dead were thus deposited at all the places passed 

 en route. The infection reached Harbin on November 

 7th, and in three months there were 5,000 deaths out 

 of a population of 30,000. Two factors seem to have 

 contributed largely to the virulence of the epidemic in 

 the Chinese city. First, the severe climatic conditions, the 

 thermometer registering at times 30 C. ( 22 F., or 54 



