India Battles Plague in Western City

SURAT, India — Officials stopped trucks and handed out antibiotics Saturday to people fleeing a deadly plague outbreak in western India in an effort to keep the disease from spreading to the country’s major cities.

Pneumonic plague, a strain of the bubonic plague, or “Black Death,” that ravaged 14th-Century Europe and Asia, has so far killed at least 51 people in Surat, a city on India’s Arabian Sea coast about 600 miles southwest of New Delhi. Surat’s civil hospital was treating 359 cases Saturday, and officials declared the city a disaster zone.

The federal government flew 8 million capsules of antibiotics to Surat, Indian television said.

In Bombay, officials stopped 4,000 trucks and sprayed them with anti-flea insecticides, an official said. The plague is spread to people by fleas that have bitten infected rats.