The plague - or Black Death - conjures up fearful images. But they are images of the past - when disease control was poor, sanitation terrible and infectious diseases raced through crowded cities. Right?
Wrong. Plague is still with us. In 2003, there were 2,118 cases of plague and 182 of those people died. Most of them - 98.7 per cent - were in Africa. But every year and usually in summer, there are cases in our own backyard, particularly on the mainland and Mongolia.
Last week, the first warning that plague is back in our region was issued by the Centre for Health Protection, which announced there were five cases in Tibet. Two victims died, giving this small outbreak a death rate of 40 per cent, about what is expected of this highly lethal infection if people do not get treated in time.
But we should not panic. While plague is still the same highly infectious, lethal disease that wiped out whole cities in Europe during the Middle Ages and caused mass panic in Hong Kong little more than a century ago, we do have weapons to fight it.
First and foremost, we know what causes plague. In fact, in Hong Kong, we should know the most about it because it was here that the organism that causes it - yersinia pestis - was first isolated in 1894 by two scientists.
Japanese scientist Shibasaburo Kitasato was the first to announce to the world, in English and Japanese, that he had isolated the organism. But a few days later, Alexandre Yersin, a French-Swiss bacteriologist, said he had isolated the causative organism.