Medicine: Donna Mae's Plague

In California's far northern Siskiyou County last week little Donna Mae De Rose, 2½, was sick in bed. Hers was no ordinary childhood disease. She had bubonic plague—the first case reported in the U.S. since last year when two boys in the same county died of the disease (TIME, Sept. 8, 1941). She had probably caught it from ground-squirrel fleas while playing in the hay in her father's barn.

But Donna Mae is lucky—she is the first U.S. plague case to be treated with sulfadiazine and she will probably recover. Her doctor, Albert Newton of Yreka, tried it on the advice of...

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