In Pursuit of the Plague : Health: Six hundred years after the Dark Ages ended, the plague is still a threat--and a full-time job for Ted Brown and Pamela Reynolds. ‘It’s the challenge of a mystery,’ he says.

Four or five days a week throughout the spring, summer and fall, Ted L. Brown laces up his steel-toed Red Wing boots, plants a wide-brimmed canvas hat on his head and hits the road.

He roams the rugged mountains and mesas of rural northern New Mexico, interviewing residents and looking for fleas. It’s hot, dirty and potentially dangerous, but he loves his job.

In late 20th-Century America, Brown tracks plague for a living.

As the senior specialist in the state environment department’s vector control program, Brown and his partner, Pamela Reynolds--the state’s only plague detectors--travel thousands of miles a year investigating cases in humans, pets and wild animals. They leave no stone unturned in their quest to trace the disease’s steps.

“It’s not an 8-to-5 job,” says Brown, a youthful-looking 49. “We’re the only ones who do it.”

If others are not eager to study plague, they might be forgiven. The very word, after all, is nearly synonymous with doom.

When the Black Death swept Western Europe in the mid-14th Century, it killed at least a third of the population, sparking vast social and political upheaval. Albert Camus based a harrowing 1947 novel on a fictional plague outbreak in a North African city.

Six hundred years after the Dark Ages ended, most people don’t realize plague remains a public-health threat. Even fewer know that plague occurs throughout the western United States. New Mexico, the nation’s plague capital, has had 195 human cases, 28 of them fatal, since record-keeping began in 1949.

Plague has kept Brown busy for much of the last 18 1/2 years. He’s worn out the knees of innumerable pairs of Levis, crawling around rodent burrows in search of plague-carrying fleas. Even with daily doses of sun block, his complexion is ruddy.

Despite the hardships and the ever-present risk of contracting plague, Brown is committed to his work. “It’s the challenge of a mystery,” he explains.

With an undergraduate degree in biology and a master’s in herpetology from the University of New Mexico, Brown got his start in the plague business courtesy of the U.S. Army, which sent him to Vietnam in the late 1960s.

A friendly man with smile lines incising the corners of his eyes, he sees humor in what most people would consider a grim subject.

One morning late in June, he shows up for work wearing a gray T-shirt emblazoned with a drawing of a flea. It reads, “Flee the Flea: Home of the Plague.” He meets up with Reynolds, 36, his partner of seven years, for a day in the field dedicated to following up on reports of plague in animals.

With Reynolds at the wheel of their blue Bronco, they visit the home of Catherine Harris, owner of a 2-year-old black-and-white cat named Ole, who is recovering from a bout with plague. Harris, who lives in a semirural area 20 miles north of Albuquerque, is not there, but she has given them permission to look around.

“You mention plague,” observes Brown, “and it opens a lot of doors.”

The cat looks plump and contented, thanks to a course of antibiotics. Just a few weeks before, she had been emaciated, Brown says. Ole isn’t talking, but Brown thinks it likely she got the disease from eating a plague-infected rodent.

“The sources of most of our cases are rock squirrels and their fleas,” he says.

Plague is caused by a simple bacterium, yersinia pestis, which lives in the gut of fleas. It has been found in 33 of the 106 flea species in New Mexico, but it most often occurs in fleas that afflict field mice, kangaroo rats and colony-dwelling rodents, such as ground squirrels and prairie dogs. The mice are resistant to plague, so they act as a natural “reservoir” for the disease, passing it on to more-susceptible squirrels and prairie dogs.

“Dog and cat fleas are not involved in this,” Brown points out, although pets and people can get the disease by eating an infected rodent or poking around an empty burrow full of hungry fleas looking for a blood meal.

The number of plague cases fluctuates widely from year to year. Two human cases have been reported so far in the United States this year, one in New Mexico and one in Nevada. There were 11 cases nationally in 1991, the highest number--four--in New Mexico. (There were none in California.)

In 1983, the record year for human plague cases in New Mexico, the disease was diagnosed in 26 people. The last human fatality was in 1985, when a 13-year-old boy who had been playing with his brother in a woodpile behind their house suffered bites on his legs.

But this is shaping up to be a big year for cat plague in New Mexico. Eighteen cases have been reported so far--the most since 1985, which had a record 30. Four dogs also have gotten plague near Santa Fe, which is unusual because they are resistant to the disease, Brown says.

No one is sure why the cases fluctuate so much or why New Mexico has the most.

“A lot of times it has to do with lifestyle,” Reynolds says. “Most people get plague near their home.”

Plague arrived in the Western Hemisphere in 1900 by way of San Francisco, carried there by ships from Asia. Within a decade, the disease had jumped from the city’s Norway rats into California’s wild rodent population. It soon spread across Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico, eventually appearing in West Texas.

The last big U.S. plague epidemic was in Los Angeles during 1924-25, when 40 people contracted the disease. Only two survived. With the advent of antibiotics, plague has become a treatable disease, but it is still a serious one.

In humans, the onset of plague usually is signaled by headache, sudden high fever, nausea and muscle aches. If treatment begins too late, it can kill from within a few days to a few weeks.

The most common form of plague is known as bubonic because buboes form on the body of the victim. These tender, swollen lymph nodes, if left untreated, form blackened, horribly painful abscesses that may split open. About half the victims would die if the condition is left untreated.

Should the bacteria reach the lungs, the disease is known as pneumonic plague, which is both more lethal and more contagious.

With the sun soaring overhead, plague detectives Brown and Reynolds unload the tools of their trade--metal traps to live-capture rodents, a flexible plumber’s snake, a wad of white flannel squares, sealing plastic bags--then set off in search of burrows.

The surroundings are classic New Mexico: bushy pinon and juniper trees surrounded by blue-green rabbitbrush and native grasses. It’s prime plague country because ground-dwelling rodents love the seeds and nuts produced by the trees.

The pair target an adobe barn, where they find a tunnel beneath the structure’s concrete slab.

“Looking at the size of it, it says ‘rock squirrel’ to me,” Brown says, getting down on all fours to inspect it. “There’s a cobweb over the front, so it hasn’t been used for a while.”

He attaches a flannel square to an alligator clip at the end of his plumber’s snake, lies on his belly and threads the snake into the hole. “We’ve found rattlesnakes in our burrows before,” Brown remarks matter-of-factly.

He and Reynolds give up on the barn and skitter down the steep banks of a nearby arroyo, a deep scar cut by erosion. Shaded from the gathering heat by leafy cottonwood trees, they bushwhack through some undergrowth in search of burrows, gingerly slipping between the strands of a barbed-wire fence.

Brown threads a cloth flag into a likely-looking hole, nearly nabbing a flea, but it hops off. Reynolds meanwhile spots another burrow some distance away, and this time Brown is successful. “Here we go, got one--hot damn!” he exclaims as he stuffs the flannel into a bag.

The fleas are sent to a Centers for Disease Control laboratory in Fort Collins, Colo. Scientists there grind up the insects and inject the resulting flea puree into lab animals to see if they develop plague, a process that can take several weeks. Blood and tissue samples from dead or sick animals are analyzed at the state laboratory in Albuquerque, yielding a quicker result.

With 125,000 square miles to cover, Brown and Reynolds have found no foolproof way of establishing where a person or pet might have gotten the disease. Often, as in Ole’s case, they come up empty-handed.

“It is sometimes like looking for a needle in a haystack,” Brown concedes.

To control the disease, they can dust burrows with a potent flea-killer called Pyraperm 455, but the most effective method is education. From kindergartens to college classrooms, the pair lecture on reducing the plague risk, urging people to clear their property of woodpiles, junked cars or other likely hiding places for rodents.

A morning’s sleuthing behind them, Brown and Reynolds pack up for the two-hour drive to a ranch up north where three squirrels have died from plague.

Reynolds says she seldom worries about catching plague because she’s rarely bitten by fleas.

On the other hand, Brown--whose face is punctuated with tiny scars from flea bites--sometimes takes a course of tetracycline to ward off infection.

“They seem to really like Ted,” Reynolds says. “Ted gets bitten a lot.”