A top health official predicted Thursday that India will soon contain its plague epidemic, even though it already has spread further than the last major outbreak nearly three decades ago.
But scientists at the World Health Organization said it is too early to say that.And six gulf states and Yemen on Wednesday suspended flights indefinitely to and from India to keep the plague from reaching their shores.
During the 1940s and early 1950s, the plague routinely killed thousands of Indians each year as the impoverished nation fought for, and eventually won, independence from Britain.
That annual death toll fell sharply between 1957 and 1966, when the last plague death occurred, said Dr. K.K. Datta, director of the National Institute of Communicable Diseases.
On Sept. 20, for the first time in 28 years, Indians began dying of the plague in the western city of Surat. Since then the official death toll in the port city on the Arabian Sea has risen to 54, and unofficial estimates to 300.
Hundreds of thousands of people fled Surat and already have spread the disease further than the last major plague epidemic, which killed 100 people in a southern state in 1962.
In 10 days, plague cases already have spread hundreds of miles from Surat to New Delhi and the states of West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra. Punjab state reported its first case Thursday. Many other states are examining hundreds of suspected plague cases in overcrowded hospitals.