Van E. Harl

THE COLONEL HAS FLEAS

In 541 AD, 60% of Europe and North Africa died because of the plague. From 1346 to 1352 one third of Europe perished because of plague. In 1855 over 12 million people were lost in China and India because of plague. With the increase of shipping due to trade from Asia (mostly China) California struggled with plague from 1900 to 1909. The state of California did not want to make an issue about it, because upsetting the public with information on a deadly disease might be bad for business. It was not until state officials put a bounty on dead rats, did the disease finally play out.

The one common denominator in all these cases was the “flea.” That tiny little bug you can hardly see. It does not even have wings, so it can’t fly, it jumps. It can jump up to 200 times its body length. That is why people usually get bit in their lower leg area. That pest you fight with, if you have fur-bearing pets.

My wife “the Colonel” had been assigned to a new air base in Oklahoma. Our plan was to drive directly to that new base and move right into the military house that was supposed to be waiting for us. Two days before leaving New Mexico, my wife was advised our new home had fleas and we would not be moving in for a couple of weeks. Now I have had dogs for 25 years and I have fought a few battles with those blood-sucking parasites. However unlike an ex-spouse or the IRS, fleas really are bloodsuckers that can kill you. But, in our case death was not the problem, a major inconvenience was.

Since we could not move into our new base home, the Wing Commander put us up in the visiting General’s quarters. I cannot complain; it was a very nice house. The problem was, we have three dogs and they would not let us have them in the General’s quarters. You never know, one of our four legged children might have fleas. There is an RV camp ground on base, so the dogs and I slept there every night. After meeting with the base entomologist about our flea issue, I started doing a little research. Plague occurs naturally, but if a flea bites an animal with plague, the flea can then transfer the disease when it bits it’s next animal victim, to include most land mammals and of course humans.

The plague of 1346-1352, known as the Black Death, came from the Crimea (but started in China), which was inhabited by Tartars, who were Muslim. When it broke out they blamed the Christian, Italian merchants. During their escape by ship to Sicily they brought back rats infected with plague caring fleas. Before it was over, plague had spread all the way to Finland. This was one of the first documented cases of Muslims using weapons of mass destruction on the Christian world.

Fleas can live close to a year without a blood-food source. What if you were to take some infected rats covered with fleas and locked them in a shipping container headed for the US? Even if the rats died, the fleas will survive. The container gets opened in some mid-west city where no one is looking for plague and the fleas get out. There are only 10-15 plague cases a year in the US. Most doctors have never seen the symptoms of plague. Navajo Indians of northern New Mexico have the highest rate of plague. They also have a lot of prairie dogs in their area. In 1998, 500 prairie dogs that had been trapped to be sold on the open worldwide market started to die of plague. This was in Hockley County, Texas (the panhandle area). They had met shipping, health requirements, but where delayed a couple of days getting distributed. That delay was a small piece of medical luck.

There is no vaccine for plague. It has to be treated with antibiotics after a patient presents symptoms. Worse than opening the plague filled container in the medically – powerful US, as a proactive terrorist, you ship the container to a border town in Mexico. Rats are a way of life in Mexican towns. A pandemic outbreak of plague could be well underway and headed to the Los Angeles area long before the US would be tracking the problem. During the Black Plague there were men pulling two-wheel handcarts through the cities crying, “Bring out your dead.” They still use two-wheel handcarts in Tijuana.

Using fleas as a weapon goes back to the days of castles and knights. During World War II the notorious chemical-biological “Unit 731” of the Japanese military dropped (from aircraft) fleas caring bubonic plague on the city of Ningbo, China (south of Shanghai). Over 100 people died of plague in November-December of 1940. This issue is still tied up in the courts today. The swiftness that the plague kills was noted by the Italian writer (of the time) Boccaccio, who said the victims “ate lunch with their friends and dinner with their ancestors in paradise.”

And to think I was upset because I was delayed moving into my home a couple of weeks late, while a major effort was made to rid the house of fleas. This new western Oklahoma air base I am located, is close to Hockley County, Texas. I must tell you I did find a big rat in my back yard this very afternoon. I wonder if it came off a shipping container.