Broadcasting Germs

    Hitherto the plague had found far more victims in the more thickly populated and less well-appointed outer districts than in the heart of the town.  Quite suddenly, however, it launched a new attack and established itself in the business center.  Residents accused the wind of carrying infection, “broadcasting germs,” as the hotel manager put it.  Whatever the reason might be, people living in the central districts realized that their turn had come when each night they heard oftener and oftener the ambulances clanging past, sounding the plague’s dismal, passionless tocsin under their windows.

Albert Camus, The Plague, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1948.  (Translated by Stuart Gilbert.)