There's Vintage, and then there's this.......

Guess what's back? 

Loud knits and horrible court shoes with a one inch blocky heel, according to the soothsayers at London Fashion week.

But more more interestingly, in my opinion, guess what else?

The Plague.

The actual plague.  Not the one His Nibs insists he has every time he sneezes twice in a twenty four hour period,  but the real deal, Bubonic Plague.

According to news reports, in February 2011, a Chicago researcher who was working with a weakened form of live plague bacteria, up until then thought to be harmless to humans, died of the plague.

In July this year a man in Oregon was bitten by a stray cat his family had adopted.  The foul moggy was apparently choking on a rat it had caught, and the man tried to save it.  The rat is thought to have had plague infected fleas.  The man survived, but lost his fingers and toes.  He won't be able to go back to work as a welder, obviously.  I have no idea what happened to the cat.

A seven year old girl in Colorado caught the plague this month from a dead squirrel, while she was on a camping holiday.  Happily, she also survived.  There's been no satisfactory explanation as to what she was doing with a dead squirrel.

Another unidentified woman, who wishes to remain anonymous, also says she was bitten by a choking stray cat.  I'm not sure whether that's true, or if she's incapable of making up her own story, but wants in on the action.

A couple in New Mexico caught the plague from fleas on their ranch in 2002.  Both survived, although he lost both his legs, and they are now writing a book about the experience.

I have to admit, I thought the plague was like smallpox, completely eradicated.  But apparently an average seven cases a year are reported in America.

And up to three thousand cases are reported around the world annually.

There hasn't been a report of bubonic plague in Europe or Australia for donkey's years.

Russia, the Middle East, China, Southwest and Southeast Asia, and Africa provide most of the cases.
In other words, where the people and sanitation are both poor, where rats and other rodents are living, literally, with the people.  And there isn't enough of anything to keep things sanitised, including clean water.

But the seven cases a year in the Western World are big news, apparently.