“He who does not know history, is obliged to repeat it”, indicates the chronicler Enrique Vega Ayala, who recounts that in Mazatlán, this serious disease presented a lethality of 71 percent
Mazatlán, Sinaloa.- From 1902 to 1903, one of the best-known epidemics in Sinaloa occurred in Mazatlán, “the bubonic plague”, which came from a ship in San Francisco, California, and which infected 824 people, of whom 582 died, so it showed a fatality rate of 71 percent.
However, thanks to the preventive measures that the City Council took at that time, they brought the town back to normal within a year; reason why they had to fence the port, disinfect one thousand 399 houses and incinerate another thousand 103; isolate 2,146 people and eliminate almost 14,000 rats, explained Enrique Vega Ayala, a chronicler from Mazatlán.
“It arrived by boat but the hygienic conditions of the city were what made this proliferate rapidly, there were months of iron control of all activities, the economy quickly stopped, there was no entry of ships or it was very controlled; They had to do a lot of infrastructure work to control the problem. “
However, he gave credit to how difficult it was to clean all the channels and streets of the city, incinerate the houses and completely encircle the entrances and exits of the port in a militarized manner, which caused the citizens to panic.
Likewise, the student of the history of Mazatlán indicated that this epidemic spread throughout Sinaloa, the Pacific coast and some other states of the Republic, so they practically had to use the same methods as this municipality to control it.
“The siege of the city and the use of all technical advances in the field of immunology; The latest generation serums were brought in at that time, medicines, vaccines that could be useful were imported and they were even tested directly with people and not with animals as the protocol dictates. ”
Vega Ayala said that today more or less the same prevention or protection measures are applied in the world to free populations from pandemics, such as the most recent of the Covid19 coronavirus, for which she emphasized the importance of having a good hygiene, as well as not falling into panic before the diseases registered in the current era.
Source: linea directa
The Mazatlan Post