but he, basically, writes a book that is, essentially, a mix tape to her in her honor because he loved her, and she's gone, and he's devastated. so this book, it sounds like, was his final mix tape for her with love songs. and it's, um -- i can't wait to read that one, so that's what i'm hoping to read this summer. .. >> i would like to thank you for inviting me to talk to you and thank you for coming out. i would like to tell you about my book the barbary plague.

it grew out of stories i was doing for the wall street journal where i work as a medical reporter. in the middle 1990's i was writing a personal health column for the journal and happened to write one we can about an outbreak of bubonic plague that occurred in india. like a lot of reporters, i was curious to know whether o >> i was curious if they were conducting surveillance at airports to make sure that no cases of disease were inadvertently brought into the country. they were doing surveillance foh this purpose, but plague was endemic here in the united states.te i was interested how it gotso here. in 1999, i began researching the story in earnest, and i came upon what was an irresistible

tale, and he was a disease, bubonic plague, old as u.s.ry history itself, but new to the shores. it was a deadly disease and ain mystery since the germ wasen identified. it was notif clear how it's w transmitted. this remind us to current events happening right now involvingrrn another epidemic, but in the case of the bubonic plague in 1900 in san fransisco, there was not just a heroic struggle to contain it, but it spawned anned enormous political cover upsett up against the backdrop of victorian san fransisco, a cityc famed for row manses, hills, and cable cars, and one which was not accustomed to being the epicenter of a deadly scourge so today we have a new epidemice touching down on american shores from across the sea.

once again, the germ is newlyo identified, but poorly understood, and the outbreak is sparking fear at home, panic abroad, and scientists race to diagnose the disease and contror the spread through means ofd isolation and quarantined, the sick are sigmatized, andl political officials, we're told, in southern china tried to minimize the disease, perhaps cover it up as to avoid devastating economic losses they would suffer. of course, denial always favors the germs which burrow deeper and deeper into an entrenched epidemic. to borrow a phrase from tv drama, this is ripped from today's headlines, but thetion description i -- fits the acute respiratory syndrome or sars, which slipped into new year's port in san

fransisco bay in 1900 aboard thl steam ship australia most likely that carried a load of passengers, a load of mail, and some uninvited 4-legged stow stowaways, rats.pen plague could have happened anywhere. new york, los angeles, seattle, new orleans.n in fact, all of these cities did see some plague cases, buts. nowhere else did plague become quite so everything trenched in thee city or in the surrounding landscape as it did in san fransisco. why is this? if you were an epidemic looking for a new home, san fransisco fulfills the realtor's three top rules for a desirable place to live.n, l location, location, location. [laughter] the golden gate was the gate way to asia and the pacific rim. it welcomed up to a thousand ships a year.ed many from the ports of hong kong

and honolulu where plague recently touched down ravaging the populations there. san fransisco in 1900 was a remarkable place. it was 50 years after the gold s rush. san fransisco aspired to be the paris of the pacific. the mining and railroad tycoons built magnificent mansions on top nob hill.ma the grand hotels such as the palace, the st. francis redesigned the skyline. there were three opera houses filled with women in french gowns. it prided itself on nurturing a artists like jack london and mark twain. it had the height ofad sophistication with porcelain bathtubs and velvet covered fatoons, but there was a dark side like poverty, racism, and

rats. in addition with the high victorian style of architecture, they had a victorian style of hygiene that consistented of butchers and garbage men hurlini garbage into the bay.ople the little enclave of chinatown, approximately a dozen squareap blocks, ranged along grant street, which was in those days called dupont, sheltered tens of thousands of working poor just p few blocks from the war of wher the rats scuttled into the city. it was vulnerable. the city was set up for plague. like the dispatchers that we've been reading about, and i and my colleagues have been writing about dealing with the sars outbreak from china, this would also produce a cover up, but tha bubonic plague coverup was one

of massive proportions stretching from san fransiscofra city hall to the governor'snsio mansion in san fransisco all thh way to the nation's capitol.al. newspapers either ridiculed thec plague, made a big joke, rank follow-upny cartoons with rather caricatures of the residents of china town or the newspapers maintained a pack of complete silence on plague. either they ridiculed it or they were silent. doctors who diagnosed it were either slandered, ridiculed, or run out of town. through the story, i get to introduced to you two colorful pioneers of public health. one is joseph kennian, a brilliant doctor and who eventually was branded the wolfe doctor by some of the residentsd

of chinatown, and the other was rupert blue, a young southern doctor with deep confederate roots who few thought was capable of handling a racially explosive pandemic.e he handled the outbreak with tact and gentleness and wasn known as the pied piper of san fransisco running rats out of ou town and controlling the plague. piper would each grapple with the plague in his own way and emerge from the crisis one rather defeated bit experience and the other who vaulted to even greater success. kenyon today is famed as the founder of the fore runner of the national institutes of health and rupert blue with went from san francisco to become surgeon general of the lands. each was tested in his own way and nearly defeated by the plague in a city so stubborn and

with such poverty and injustice that dr. blue once said that the city and its people are a law unto itself. so, looked at through the aids and sars, many of the events in this book may seem to be prophetic or sort of a premise anything of things to come. but i think the history of epidemic mix share common threads and leads us to study history so we don't precinct it. i would like to read a couple of short excerpts. from the opening chapters. the first is entitled "the year of the rat." the year of 1900 ushered in dangerous times. in san francisco it was as always a holiday with two faces. downtown white people raised their usually end of the year

ruckus. in china town a shadow fell over the new year in an ominous prologue. rain spattered the board walks. a band of gathered on the corner of market and korney streets below union square and china town blowing on horns and clanging cow bowels. they threw confetti. then the celebration really turned ugly. charging north up kearny street for five blocks they reached china town and began grabbing chinese musical instruments from the shops. the din was so loud it pierced the paneled recesses of the nearby men's clubs. bystanders cinked to here the

noise. but sentiments were very much in order in the year 1900 for death was the uninvited guest here although like the maskers it came in disguise. in china town the approach of the chinese new year usually in february was most often heralded bit hiss and bang of fire crackers. sidewalk stands traditionally sold stacks of juicy sugar cane and mounds of melon seeds. to perfume the spring banquet tables people would buy pots of narcissus bulbs. people wearing silk tune in this case would call on family and friends with gifts and cakes.

children in skull caps and head dresses would parade hand in hand. all of this would happen in a festive lunar new year. but not in this year of 1900. ned of fireworks, gunfire rang through the streets and the alley's ran with blood. gang warfare had struck china town and the san francisco police department cracked down on the whole district canceling all holiday celebrations. sidewalks were bearen of flowers and the streets were still. so, the chinese new year of 1900 crept in as drab and gray as its namesake on the great wheel of the calendar. so as it happened 1900 was the year of the rat. it didn't take long for those other rats to find their way up into china town.

and didn't take long for the other shoe to fall. on the afternoon of tuesday march 6, 1900 the phone rang at police headquarters. a dead man was in the tchine knees under take shop at 81 clay street and the police physician needed to issue a burial certificate. it bore no gross signs of foul play, no bullet holes or knife wounds but he died of a violent disease. hiffs wan chut king. he was a lumber salesman living in the globe hotel on dupont street object the corner of jackson of. the globe hotel a once fashionable spot turned flop house was known as the five stories. its cramped cells sheltered hundreds of chinatown's working in a land they called gold

mountain. now he was middle aged and sick. when he felt too weak to drag himself to work at the lumber yard i took to his quarters at the globe. the gas light shed a weak gold halo over the bunk where he lay. he shifted you easily on his cot. local healers gave him herbs to east his aches. a serious fever paid him sweat and shiver. he fell into a fiery delirium. when the police surgeon arrived at the coffee shop he unwrapped the corpse. he palpated the contours of the form where rigor mortis was setting n. he discovered swollen lymph glance. plainly visible was a sore where he had scratched. the police surgeon sent for the city health officer, a.p.

o'brien and together they telephoned a young city bacteriologsit. they performed an autopsy and pierced the lumps and withdrew fluid. under the micro scope a swarm of bacteria swam that focus. clusters of short rod shaped germs with rounded tips that when stained was classic bacteria that stains turned pink. it looked suspiciously like plague. police officers didn't wait for a confirmation of the diagnosis. they descended on chinatown in the darkness stringing ropes around it. whites were ushered out of chinatown and chinese were sealed inside. panic exploded.

some raced the lengths of the barricades, pacing the prilt, looking for a way out. clearly on gold mountain in the year of the rat the bad times were about to get worse. cradling autopsy sounds from king which will fred kellogg boarded a street car to angel island. 40 minutes later the vessel swung around the north side of angel island, cut its engines and nosed into hospital cove. kellogg steadied his sea legs and lawyer ofed down the pier and went to the quarantine officer joseph j. kenyon's. kenyon's job was to inspect arriving ships, check the passengers and crew, isolate the check, fumigate the cargo and in short keep diseases out of the country. it was his duty to impose federal standards of hygiene on

this port city which after washington must have seen like a frontier outpost. he had been sent from the capital to san francisco 10 months before. this was his area to take care of. he was a doctor trained in europe in a new science of bacteriologists founded by louis pasteur. he had a tender ego and a gut to match. a public health officer needs the hide of a pachyderm he ones told a friend. instead he had the skin of an onion. with kellogg at his side kenyon looked at the bacteria from king's tissue and blood.

he felt a throb of recognition. yes, this was it. so, the pink tinted rods, dark at the end. but to be sure of the diagnosis kenyon had to isolate the germ in pure culture and inoculate test an analysis to create the same disease of king. he injected a rat, two guinea pigs and a monkey. he placed the test animals in their cages and then inside earthen aware vessels for safety hen he waited. downtown the san francisco chronicle and all the other newspapers ridiculed the plague scare. political pundits believe it was a scam to win money for the underfunded board of health. there were jokes about the board of health. kenyon was branded a charlatan.

he was lampooned in the paper. newspapers loved to report stories in verse. the verse went this way. have you heard of the deadly bmp acili sunday scourge scourge of a populace land. which threatens to kill us. the monkey is living and thriving and guinea pigs seem to be well and the health board is con drivering excuses for having raised hell. inside chinatown it really was hell. anxious, hungry, fearing for their lost wages and their unattended jobs, the chinese were sick with dread. those who believed the disease was plague feared being trapped inside the infected zone. those who doubted that the

plague was real by all accounts the majority, feared that the quarantine was merely a pretext for more discrimination against them, a prelude to fire or demolition of their homes. after three days of quarantine with no new cases having materialized. s, the test animals were still alive. the chinese were threatening to file a lawsuit protesting the blockade and asking for damages to recover lost funds. the health department now felt foolish and had little choice but to lift the quarantine. rumors about the block candidate's impending end brought people pouring in the streets of china town in anticipation of their freedom. on march 10 at 4:00 p.m. the ropes came down and cheers went up. thousands of chinese flowed back into san francisco. food delivery began again. men and women went back to work.

whites cheered what they saw as the end of their ordeal because they had missed their servants and helpers who were trapped inside the quarantine zone. so once again the examiner newspaper published a verse. this entitled "the raising of the quarantine." it goes this way. "sweet fong is at his post-once more and cooking supreme. once more on the kitchen range. joyful plenty smiles again for low the board of health has raised the chinatown blockade. but this was all premature for two days later on march 12, 1900, the scuffling animals in the cages of the angel island lab went silent.

when kenyon looked in he found the rat and guinea pigs lying cold in their cage. the monkey grew listless, hung his head and died the next day. this test which proved that bubonic plague was in san francisco is what sets the tale in motion. it began a dangerous decade for san francisco. pot not one but two plague outbreaks would break out in san francisco joined by the 1960 earthquake. city fathers refused to admit that the plague had infected san francisco. they blamed the disease's victims instead. and in a brazen coverup which is documented by letters at the national archives in washington they denied it for years. so, once again i believe it is

instructive to look to history so that we don't blame the victims of our epidemic mix so we don't live under the illusion that screrms pay attention to national borders. i'm often asked whether this plague in san francisco was a real epidemic, and i'm assured by epidemiologists more expert than i that indeed it was. i'm sure that you may have some questions of your own. so, i would be happy to take any questions about my book or about plague, or anything else you may be curious about. any questions? yes. >> what did you find to be the most factual and objective source of information since there was a lot of coverup? where was the most objective information? >> what is really interesting is that people in those days knew how to do a coverup but didn't know how to cover up the traces. so there are letters on federal

letterhead station they arery discussing how they would go about doing this. in fact, this is an episode in history where the primary source materials were really rich, so there was really a lot of research and there was a lot of fun. one place i went after doing some online research and looking at scholarly papers by medical historians was go to the national archives, the national archives 2 in college park, maryland. that is where they store all of the public health records. and when i arrived a wonderful ar i'vist met me with a hand truck the size of a v.w. beat mounded with books filled with official correspondence, telegrams written in code for in those days public health officers wrote all of their

sensitive communications in code and there was a federal code handbook. so, the code word for plague was bumpkin and the code word for the san francisco health board was burlesque with is ironic because in those days the board of health was on the side of truth but the whole side was quite a burlesque. so the archives in in washington was a great source plus the one here in the bay area in san bruno, california. then newspaper microfilm was a great resource. around, in addition, i had some great good fortune and one of the most wonderful discoveries of my research process came when i tried to find some personal letters of my heros.

dr. rupert blue left enormous numbers of official letters, but he was, he polesed a challenge to a writer because he was something of a quiet hero. he was a good soldier and never complains and never explains and a very good doctor and scientist but rarely tipped his hands about the emotional reaction of running a plague campaign in a city that denied the plague. so, i went to his home town of marion, south carolina and i found his will at the county courthouse. and i found that although dr. blue, who had been briefly married to an act rest then divorced from her which is -- had no children but he willed his papers to the nephews, the sons of his brother. and i looked up one of the sons of the nephews, michael hughes

who lives in jacksonville, florida and said i understand that you have inherited the papers of your ancestor dr. rupert blue and if there are any letters in existence i would love to be able to read them to learn about him. he said well there are supposed to be some alerts in the attic but i have never seen them. so meanwhile i'm on my book leave and the months are passing and the clock is ticking. and about one week -- this is a moment when every, a moment that every author simultaneously desires and dreads -- i get this phone call from mr. hughes in florida saying i hope it is not too late. i found them. so, he had uncovered this amazing cache of about 75 handwritten letters by dr. rupert blue beginning in about 1888 when he was just a young man working as a pharmacist's assistant in a little country town through starting his college years and medicine

school and excitement at -- med school through applying to the public health school and waiting for acceptance and being dispatched to the plague zones such as san francisco and yellow fever in new orleans all the way up to his appointment as surgeon general in the late anyone 30's and his -- 1930's and appointment as surgeon general in 1911 through his ouster in 1920 for somewhat political reasons and then in the 1930's when he became sort of an elder state man of public health and went to europe working with international health congresses and the league of nations. so, finding private letters, i think, was one of the great joys of researching this book. and although some of them were found with sort of good old traditional shoe left they are

detective work i also had good luck on line because he had a very interesting lieutenant, a man named colonel by rucker and those of you who read the book will be as charmed by dr. rucker as i was. dr. rucker stood about 5'6" to dr. blue's six feet and he was a charming man, had a gift with speech and could charm all of the ladies of san francisco into covering their metal trash cans and routing the rats. in fact, his war cry became ladies when you look in your garbage cans, think of me. so, this made him very popular. but dr. rucker had a personal tragedy. for a while he was fighting the plague in san francisco his wife annette contracted tuberculosis.

so, on the one hand you had the black death of the playing and the white playing of tuberculosis. and i was curious to what became of the ruckers, but the trail came cold so i went to the online genealogical sites and there was a rucker family website so i typed in a random query and said if any of you are you related to w. colonel by rucker i would love to correspond with you. so once again months passed and i had about given up, then one day i opened my email file and there was a bold faced message and an email from someone named colonel by rucker. i felt like the ghost had passed across my screen and when i opened it up i found the most delightful email from a

gentleman who said, "i'm so delighted to hear you are interested in learning about my grandfather." so it was another colonel by ruck terror, colonel by buxton rucker of maryland who shared his grandfather's memoirs and diaries and journal pages and unpublished remarkable autobiography that talked about their adventures in the plague campaign. so i was tremendously fortunate and lucky in finding very rich primary sources because that's what writers always love best are primary sources. so, a long but good question, one i'm happy to answer. who else? >> how did you get to be a medical reporter? did you have a science background, education?

>> i'm an english major. i went to stanford. i was an english major. then i subsequently went to the university of california berkeley and went through the journalism program. so i'm a lay-man. i don't have a science background except to say i read everything i can get my hands on and i have been covering medical science for the journal since the mid 1980's so i try to read arms and talk to as many experts as i can. yes, the gentleman right there. see if we can get the microphone to him. >> i don't think this microphone is going anywhere. >> you can just shout. >> a little off the subject but as a medical reporter i'm curious about sars.

>> the microphone doesn't work. oh, it is working for you? severe cute respiratory syndrome. isn't that redundant or is there a difference between severe around acute? >> that's a good question. the gentleman asked is the name, turning to modern day epidemic of sars, is the name severe acute respiratory syndrome redundant? and i don't think it is actually. i may be wrong and i would be happy to have any doctors in the crowd correct me. i think we may have some. i believe the severe prefers to how serious it is and acute refers to the sort of sudden violent onset. so on the one hand it is very terrible and severe but it is also a very sudden and violent onset. so in that sense i think it may

not be redundant. >> in that bubonic plague reers its ugly ahead above 5,000 feet in the certify aia's every year, did you -- sierra. did your studies show how it was transmitted to the seeras. >> the way that it spread into the sierra actually can in fran. because of the cover coverup it was allowed to smolder in san francisco and eventually jumped species from your ban rats into rural squirrels, chip monks and eventually prairie dogs in the southwest. so, in discussing this 1900 outbreak with some sources at the center for disease control

and as you may or may not know they have a plague outpost in fort collins colorado which they monitor for signs of disease in the prairie dogs. they said it was not unusual for plague to jump from urban rats in animals in the country side. and it wasn't long before rupe earth blue and his team of sanitarian as had he called themselves those days in public health began to notice that there were cases of plague cropping up in the east bay, in the berkeley hills and in oakland and a little further east it crept into places like walnut creek. there were some ranchers' children who died. and they would find dead or

dying ground squirrels and chipmunks. they had an unusual way for testingto plague in the country side in those days. when they would find a ground squirrel but roy they would use a guinea pig and tie a drink to its leg and lower it into the burrow to see if it could pick up fleas from the infected animals and reel it in and comb the animal for fleas then test them for the plague bacteria. so, they documented the spread into the country side rather rapidly and to their dismay and when that happened they took off into the hills with pup tents and squirrel guns and all sorts of bait but couldn't

outflampinge it. it just took off and spread as far east as the rockies, where it is today. of course mostly around the four corners area. the man in the white hat. >> when the plague hits in the middle ages it decimates large numbers. why wasn't it worse when it hit from this area? >> that is a really good question and i'm glad you asked that one. san francisco was extremely lucky in many respects because this bacterium is the same plague germ that was responsible, we believe, for the black deaths and the same germ which wiped out perhaps a quarter it a third of europe. a couple of things were different about san francisco. the main one, which is sort of a surprise, is that the breed of

flea that predominated in san francisco was a little different from the flea in areas where there had been such tremendous karn najaf and human deaths -- carnage and human death from the plague. the place where plague had its most deadly outbreak immediately prior to san francisco was hong kong. and when rupert blue and his public health officers did studies of rats, when they finally realized that the mode of transmission was from the rat flea to the human through the middle man of the flea they started doing some flea studies. and they very carefully catalogued all of the fleas that they could find on the rats. and they discovered that there were different flea species that predominated in hong kong and san francisco and it turned out that the one predom -- predominant in san francisco was

fully capable of transmitting plague but it didn't collect the germs into such a concentrated dose. the predominant flea species in china at the time had a very peculiar feature of its an anatomy. it had in its stomach a sort of basket of spines and this basket of spines would sort of collect the plague germ and this ball of plague germs would grow into an extremely concentrated dose, if you will, of the infectious germs. so, when the fleas would bite they would inject a tremendous lethal dose. whereas the fleas in san francisco lacked these spiney linings in their stomachs so that when they reinjected the jerls when they bit the new -- germs when they bit the new victim it was the same germ but a more diluted form.

less potent. so in discussing this outbreak with scientists at c.d.c., they think that that lucky sort of chance occurrence of having different fleas in the city may have saved it from a much greater number of casualties. i will take first the lady in the sort of plum colored jacket. >> i had a little bit of information. our family came to california in 1935. my father was a bacteriologists and went to work for the public health service doing bubonic plague research and the public health building was behind the hospital in those days. he went out every summer in a mobile lab and did dissecting and they shot all of the animals

you just mentioned. and at that time, that was 1935 when we came to california, for the next few years until the war, when they didn't go out into the field every summer, but the plague feels in the 11 western states and they traveled from place to place doing this, this shooting and dissecting and, of course, my dad's part was the dissecting and taking the samples back and the various things. >> i don't know if you all had a chance to hear this but evidently your father was doing much the same work as rupert blue and the other early public health officers did. and there is still today, in 2003, surveillance in the countrieside to testing the level of plague in the wildlife.

some of you may remember that one of the state parks which has a camp ground, donner state park was closed to campers after some chipmunks were found to be carrying plague infected fleas. any other questions? right here. >> did they try to treat the people that had it in 1900 or did they die too fast in and what do they do now if somebody gets it? >> right. the question is did they treat the people in 1900 and what what is available now for treatment. unfortunately in 1900 there was really no cure for plague. they had a rather primative vaccine created by a french-russian scientist. he had the vaccine that was so

toxic and made people so ill that much feared it. they tried to vaccinate the people in chinatown and one young girl in a home was so terrified that she jumped out the window rather than face the needle and she survived but with broken ankles, i'm afraid. apart from that, of course they could treat fever, they could give supportive care and that sort of thing. but there really was no good treatment for plague in 1900. today people are more fortunate because it turns out that plague , being a bacterial disease is very responsive to certain standard antibiotics such as strep toe my sin. so if plague is quickly diagnosed and treated in a timely way, you can recover, although i think in the news we saw demonstrated this year the continuing power of plague to be

very lethal if the diagnosis is delayed and if treatment isn't started very quickly. there was a couple from new mexico who traveled from their home in the country side outside albuquerque, i believe and traveled to new york city where they checked into a fancy hotel, had a nice dinner out and the next morning felt awful and thinking that they would treat this flu or whatever it was themselves, delayed going to the hospital. when they finally became so sick that it was clear they needed urgent care, they were diagnosed with bubonic plague. the woman responded readily to the antibiotic and was quite fine. her husband was in critical condition for weeks to months and suffered lasting injuries. so, it is a bad bug. plague untreated can be 60 to 90% fatal. that is huge.

today we are terrified at a sars epidemic with something like between 4% or as high as 5% or 6% mortality. any other questions? >> by today's standard and whatever standard was used in 1900, was the plague actually an epidemic or not? >> that is a good question. a lot of people look at the 1900 plague. in total, about 300 people, almost 300 people in san francisco, would eventually contract the plague, and almost 200 of them died in the first decade of the 20th century.

by the standards of the european outbreak that is small. but an epidemic semitic generally one exceeds the normal baseline. but since this was the first in the united states and there was no normal baseline of plague cases it was definitely an epidemic. and when i checked out the rather modest size of this epidemic with the c.d.c., they said it certainly was an epidemic and if we were to have 40 cases, or even as few as a dozen cases of bubonic plague in a major american city today, it would be an emergency of major proportions. so, they would probably come down with all of the sophisticated endeem logic technology this could be brought to bear. so it was definitely an epidemic. and i might add that the official casualty list in the death toll may not represent the

full toll. because the fear of sigma was such that -- stigma was such that people actually hid their sick and dead. there are tales of san francisco police and public health officers attempting to conduct inspections observing people hurriedly carrying their sick friends over the rooftops. this was to avoid the penalty which was quarantine, isolation, fumigation, logs of business. and all for a disease that the authorities are telling them that didn't exist. so, the toll may have been quite a bit higher. any other questions? right here in the front. >> how good was their00'sing -- understanding of sterile technique? and what kinds of chemicals did they have to protect themselves? >> well, their knowledge of

sterile technique was probably pretty rudimentary. fumigation was generally done with sulfur. so, it turned everything in the house yellow from the fumes. and it didn't smell very good. and they used carbolic acid to disinfect a lot. so they had but it was an imperfect way since it was the rat that caused it, with the rat flea. so not until the city conducted a serious rodent control program was the plake wiped out. and it is kind of amusing to realize that some victorians actually thought rats played a healthful role and were the fellow travelers and natural

garbage collectors. so after the earth quake and the city was being rebuilt the workmen threw their lurges on the ground and the rats spread furiously in the ruins of earthquake shattered san francisco. and by the end of the second plague campaign as the city was being rebuilt when it finally pulled together and thought as one and wrote the official history of the second plague campaign to document its great success it was estimated that there had been perhaps 2 million rats in san francisco. and this at a time when the human population was just about 400,000. so there may well have been five rats for every human being. so, it was a major infestation. so, sulfur wouldn't have done a lot of good without some serious rat control.

>> how did the media treat it while the politicians were trying to cover it up? >> that is very interesting. there would be a report of a case, then the next day there would be a denial from the mayor's office. so, you saw this sort of give and take. and the different papers covered it differently depending on the politics of the editor and editorial pages. the chronicle was probably the longest holdout and refused well into the second outbreak to recognize the reality of the plague. on the other hand the san francisco examiner which was owned by william randolph hearst and which was famed for beginning what we now call yellow journalism, actually covered the plague in a very sort of alert fashion.

and it is probably not because he was a great champion of public health but just because it was a darn good story. one of the papers that did a really good job of covering the plague truthfully was the sacramento bee. and once the bee got on the story it was determined to document each and every case. and it took on the governor of the state, whose name was henry gauge. and gauge, who was an eastern lawyer who came to the los angeles area to become a rancher and later ran for governor, really sort of staked his whole political career on denying the existence of plague. in fact, he came up with a rather remarkable conspiracy theory to account for the inconvenient fact that they were starting to prove the diagnosis. and his theory was that joseph kenyon, the quarantine officer

on angel island who first made the diagnosis, his theory was that dr. kenyon had actually smuggled in plague bacteria in vials and had injected it that the bodies of people from san francisco that had died of other causes. so he had accused him of sort of a very contorted victorian act of bioterrorism in a sense to prove the case and to exert federal control over the sovereign said of state of california. he also went to the lengths of proposing that it be made a felony for newspapers to report what he called false cases of plague. but, despite this some of the reporters went on reporting it. so, it was variable. each newspaper had its own stamp. they were also very big on cartoons and poetic renditions

of the news. for cartoons and things you will have to go to the san francisco public library and enjoy the microfilm as i did. any other questions about the book or the plague? >> you mentioned before that fran was lucky that it could have happened in new york or new orleans. why didn't it? >> well, actually, it did. i think new york had a single plague case aboard a ship before san francisco's plague. but it never took root in the city itself. new orleans had quite a little outbreak of plague in, i think, 1914. l.a. had a couple of cases around the turn of the century. one little boy got plague and i believe he survived. but they found a single infected

plague squirrel near his home. but it never really took root. so, port cities, which were accustomed to having outbreaks of disease imported from abroad, would occasionally have a handful of cases plague. about you -- but it found minister fertile ground in san francisco. >> i believe i recently saw a movie with richard widmark about the plague in new orleans. >> do you remember the name of the movie? >> no. but i think it was on our p.b.s. station, channel 9. >> well, you will be interested to know that the hero of the tale rupert blue, who was then surgeon general always loved field work and when plague broke out in new orleans he got back

into harness and headed down to new orleans to confront what he called "my old them dismiss, the rat." >> that name doesn't bring back. >> maybe the name was changed. >> no, this was supposed to be a true story. and they gave the office the plague fighting officer's thing. he was with the public health service. >> right. port cities have always been vulnerable to importation of disease on ships and as we know international airports are as well. at the time of my book they felt that the diseases could literally fly around the world because they had just changed from wind driven ships to steam ships. so coal fired steam ships seemed to be a lightning fast way to ship freight and passengers and also to share microbes and

various diseases. now they just travel by jet. thank you very much for coming out. i enjoyed talking with you. >> what did these two huge missing pieces of the titanic

tell us? well, at the time, john and i are divers, wreck divers. we know how to search out on the bottom, we know the difference between different parts of the ship, but the individual components, the edges of the steal tell a story beyond our abilities. we're not metalists, we're not naval architects of engineers. what we did was document the edges of the two huge pieces carefully to bring that evidence to the experts so they could look at it and tell a story, and the story starts to unfold, not necessarily two and a half miles down while we're in the mirror, but months later in laboratories and in where they fit in the all of titanic, and they start to tell a time line, and they start to tell us things about that

night that don't exactly line up with what we've come to know about the story of titanic. most of us have seen james cameron's wonderful film, and we're all drawn to the horrible moment when the two main characters are holding on to the back of this huge ship as the stern rears out of the water and then breaks in half and then titanic sinks. that's pretty much what i thought was the story of titanic when i got into that mirror submersible, but the steal that we found says that simply didn't happen. the steal says that the ship broke apart at a very, very gentle angle, nothing like 45 degrees. more like 11 degrees. well , what is the difference? what is the difference that night? well, 1500 people stayed on board titanic. they did not get into the lifeboats. the lifeboats pulled away very

calmly with 500 empty seats. people made decisions that night as the ship slowly sank into the water. do i say here on board titanic and wait for the rescue ships or get into the lifeboats? when you're on a ship that's only bending at 11 degrees, it seems like you have a long time to go before the ship's going to break apart or sink. as a matter of fact, the idea of the ship breaking apart was never in their mind, but that's exactly what happened. while the ship was flooding, she started to break apart. if we look at it, most people have understood the story of titanic to be that titanic set sail on her maiden voyage, and then on a clear, calm night, struck an iceberg, sank, and broke apart. the pieces of steal that john and i documented say that titanic struck an iceberg, then broke apart and