"The situation," said Health Minister of State Harsh Vardhan, "can be controlled in two to three weeks."

But although modernization offers the means to control epidemics, disease springs from modernization gone awry. In Surat, for example, rapid industrialization and growth has created communities outside the control of the city administration.

Martha Chen, research associate at the Harvard Institute of International Development, said that the epidemic had been caused by "break down of infrastructure, especially due to urban population growth."

"What comes with all this growth is communities outside health and sanitation services," she said. "It's a case where the government is simply overstretched."

Disease seem always to spring from disruption in the accustomed order. Lyme disease, for example, was caused by the overpopulation of deer which followed a change in the habitat.

Modernization May Hurt

As the world undergoes the accelerated change of modernization, opportunities for disease may only increase. The disruptions caused by large movements of people and goods illustrates one way disease spreads.

Surat is one example of many people brought together hurriedly. Cholera arrived in South American in 1991 in the bilge water of a freighter. A more recent example of cholera attack appears in the migration of 20,000 Rwandans to Zaire two months ago. The result of a massive disruption in demography was an epidemic of cholera.

Although these diseases can be treated, as Warwick Anderson, assistant professor of the history of science, notes instead of just treating diseases, public health officials should aim to prevent the conditions that caused them in the first place.

In fact, excessive use of antibiotics could cause bacteria to become resistant, according to Dr. Lincoln Chen, professor of international health at the School of Public Health. For example, he says, a strain of malaria developed which was immune to the treatment.

Old diseases re-emerge because in general they lielatent in the animal population. In a sample of 247 infections, Will Kastens of the School of Public Health discovered that 180 were shared by animals. The bubonic plague is an example, and will probably prove impossible to eradicate.

Inhabitants of Boston may enjoy good sanitation and little contact with rats, but disease could arrive from anywhere in the world in less than twelve hours by airplane. In fact, a flight arrives from India twice a week in Logan airport. Airports in the Middle East have even prohibited all flights from India to prevent spread of the plague.

Nevertheless, it is unlikely that the plague would hit Boston, since it would probably surface during the nearly twenty-hour-long trip. In general air travelers have the wealth to afford the treatment necessary to control contagion, according to Lincoln Chen.

Researchers suggest instead that we look to the sea for epidemics. The city of Boston pours tons of pollution and sewage into the water, causing change to the ecosystems. Already algae bloom points to a very unbalanced environment. Perhaps some vicious bacteria is breeding in the sewage, waiting to spread infection by a carrier as apparently innocent as a flea.