Philobiblon

I was reading a piece about Uganda, one of the “success stories” of Africa, which is curently battling (although not all in the same place) outbreaks of ebola, yellow fewer, cholera, meningitis and bubonic plague. Bad enough, and then I read the explanation of why it was chiefly women who were suffering from the last disease:

Dr Otaala attributed the incessant occurrence of plague in Nebbi along the frontier line with the DR Congo, to the primitive culture of the indigenous people “where men sleep on beds while women sleep on the floor.”
“The people mainly affected are women because in that district (Nebbi), women only come up on the bed (for sex),” Dr Otaala said, at the Media Centre in Kampala.
“The flea (that causes plague) can only jump up to six inches (high) and (that means) if everybody was sleeping on a bed, there would be no plague in this country,” Dr Zaramba.