plague with 31 fatalities. Since then there have been around 16 cases a year in the United States, most connected with rock squirrels and its common flea Oropsylla montana.
             In the years of World War II the Japaneese army formed a special biological warfare division. This unit worked on developing a method to deliver the plague bacteria to the civilian population of China. They tested the effectiveness of the plague as a weapon of war first on prisoners of war, then on unsuspecting civilians. In their first tests they confined a small group of prisioners in a room with thousands of plague infested fleas. The moratlity rate in these experiments were somewhere in the neighborhood of 50-60 percent.
             The next step was to release the plague on the general population of Manchuria. This was accomplished by planes flying over cities and villages and releasing huge amounts of plague infested fleas over the town. When this proved to be an inaccurate way of spreading the disease, and would periodiocally result in the infection of the air cr
             ...