text: It was eight months since feline hemorrhagic fever had appeared on the West Coast. The disease was now as familiar as the common cold. The number of domestic cats that had perished was not known. However, veterinary epidemiologist Darnall Rengis at the University of Michigan estimated that 80 to 90 percent of the animals in North America had died. Cats in Europe and Asia were becoming ill at an alarming rate. Spot-checks indicated that worldwide, three-fourths of all domestic cats on Earth were wiped out.
  
  On the Australian continent, plagues of mice were invading homes, clogging machinery, and destroying cereal crops. Farmers were poisoning thousands of mice each night and scooping up their carcasses with skip loaders the next day. In New South Wales, a pilot was killed when his small plane skidded on a runway swarming with mice. Australia's minister of agriculture pointed out that the murine population explosion was not simply due to the absence of cats, but to bountiful crops following an exceptionally wet winter and spring.
  
  In Los Angeles County, after a thirty-four-year-old woman was diagnosed as the thirteenth victim of plague in four months, public-health officials declared that plague, both pneumonic and bubonic, had reached epidemic status. Emergency measures would be taken to eradicate infected rodents. It was the largest outbreak of the disease since 1924, when pneumonic plague killed thirty-three people in the county.
  
  Baboons in zoos all over the world were coming down with FHF-like illnesses. Some died, but most survived. The primates proved to be considerably more resistant to FHF than domestic cats. Ruth Schau, senior zoologist at the National Zoo in Washington, pointed out that no primates other than baboons had developed the illness. The NIH and the USDA worked with the CDC to monitor all viral infections in zoo animals. They stood ready to impose strict quarantines at the first sign of FHF in primates other than baboons.
  
  Throughout North America, veterinarians were inoculating any cats brought to their clinics with all the common FIV and FeLV vaccines. They and the cats' owners hoped that one or more of these might protect the animals against FHF. None of the vaccines demonstrated any benefit.