Anatomy of an outbreak

In the autumn of 1924, rumours began emerging from the Mexican quarter of Los Angeles of an outbreak of a horrifying new disease. Symptoms included fever, coughing and severe pneumonia, and when nine Latinos who had attended the funeral of a recent victim died, the authorities quarantined the Mexican quarter.

Officially, health officials blamed the outbreak on a recurrence of a “severe form of Spanish influenza”, which had sparked a pandemic just six years earlier. In fact, as early as October, the authorities knew that the problem was plague. Seventeen years before, an outbreak of the rat-borne disease had brought terror to downtown San Francisco, but at a time when Los Angeles was selling itself as a