Historical review of the plague in South America: a little-known disease in Colombia

Abstract

The plague is an infectious disease that has transcended through history and has been responsible for three pandemics with high mortality rates. During the third pandemic that started in Hong Kong (1894), the disease spread through maritime routes to different regions in the world, including South America. In this region, approximately 16 million people are thought to be at risk in relation to this disease due to specific situations like human-rodent coexistence inside houses in rural areas, homes built with inadequate materials that are vulnerable to invasion by these animals, inappropriate storage of crops and an increase in rainfall and deforestation, which allows for the displacement of wild fauna and man invasion of the natural foci of the disease.

Between 1994 and 1999, five countries: Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Peru and the United States of America, reported approximately 1,700 cases with 79 related deaths. In Colombia we have historical data about an “infectious pneumonia” with high mortality rates that occurred during the same months, for three consecutive years (1913 to 1915) in the departments of Magdalena, Atlántico and Bolívar, located in the Colombian Atlantic coast, which suggested plague, but could not be confirmed.