In the wake of the plague came the clamour for plague-beating drugs, particularly tetracycline. Says Prabir Biswas, director (marketing) of the Indian Drugs and Pharmaceuticals Ltd (IDPL), "When

Till September 1994, plague was s 'upposedly a forgotten disease in India. It caught the country's medics aghast at their own ignorance. But after its outbreak, medical authorities have taken

Although the plague was thought to have been sent packing in 1966, isolated suspected cases have since been reported, the most recent being from Him Pradesh in 1984. Besides, since 1989, the

The plague caught institutions everywhere completely inert. Only the Plague Surveillance Unit (PSU) in Bangalore - the last of its kind in the country - and its sub-unit at Kolar in Karnataka,

The plague today holds the same threshold of dread that it did in the 14th century. So when the Black Death struck India late last month, the administration and the country's health system collapsed under the power of both