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Still no vaccine to Typhus, but it was beaten in overcrowded ghettos of Warsaw in 1941

For 450 years Typhus ravaged Europe. The death rate without antibiotics is somewhere from 10 – 40%.

There is still no vaccine to typhus, but overcrowded ghettos of partially starving people managed to stop the spread in 1941. The Nazis crammed some 450,000 people into a 3.4km2 area in Warsaw. In the first round, typhus spread rapidly, infecting 120,000 people and killing 30,000. But the Jews got organized and just as everyone was expecting rates to rocket with winter approaching, the exponential curve fell off suddenly “to extinction”. A new paper claims they beat it with social distancing, hygiene, and home quarantine.

Typhus is due by a bacterium transmitted by lice and fleas. It causes a fever, headache and rash. It was such a scourge that in 1759 one estimate suggests as many as a quarter of all prisoners in England died from typhus. Infection rates were so bad in prison that the disease was called ‘gaol fever’ and prisoners on trial would even infect court members from time to time. In the early 1600’s more than 10% of the total German population may have been killed by typhus. Currently it is infrequent except for in a few African and South American nations. There were less than 50 cases in the US during the 35 years up to 2010.

 New study explains how the Warsaw Ghetto beat typhus

RMIT via  MedExpress,
“Fortunately, many of the anti-epidemic activities and interventions are documented, and it turns out that Warsaw Ghetto had many experienced doctors and specialists,” he says.

Stone found evidence of well organized training courses covering public hygiene and , hundreds of public lectures on the fight against typhus and an underground medical university for young students.

General hygiene and apartment cleanliness were encouraged and sometimes enforced. Social distancing was considered basic common sense, and home quarantining was not uncommon. Many volunteer soup kitchens were opened up in the period before the epidemic’s decline.

“In the end, it appears that the prolonged determined efforts of the ghetto doctors and anti-epidemic efforts of community workers paid off,” Stone says.

“As those in the Warsaw Ghetto demonstrated, however,” Artzy-Randrup explains, “the actions of individuals in practicing hygiene, social distancing and self-isolating when sick, can make a huge difference within the community to reduce the spread. It is the cooperation and active recruitment of communities that beat epidemics and pandemics, not government regulations alone.

Typhus was largely controlled around the world in the 20th Century because in 1909 Charles Nicolle realized that lice were the vector. In World War I, delousing stations were set up on the Western Front, though typhus killed thousands on the Eastern Front, and by 1922 it was raging in Russia with some 25 million cases. After World War II major outbreaks were quelled, largely with personal and public hygiene and a lot of DDT.

The Rickettsia bacterium is not the same as coronavirus which can spread through the air, but it’s kind of inspiring that community compliance and public health measures can stop deadly killers even in crowded impoverished ghettos.

We can’t stop coronavirus with the exact same measures, but it’s still possible to extinguish transmission lines with determined dedication. It’s harder to stop an airborne spread but we have so many more tools at our disposal than imprisoned Jews did in 1941. What we seem to lack is the will. Coronavirus is only a fragile string of chemical code that will decay in two weeks if it doesn’t find any new bodies to live in.  Thankfully it’s nowhere near as deadly as typhus, but ironically, if it were that deadly, it’d probably kill less people in the West overall. We’d be shutting borders, wearing masks, and we’d be galvanized into action, not squabbling.

How much damage has already been done to our formerly high-trust societies?

When universities like James Cook Uni sack their whistleblowers and turn themselves into Government PR machines, the price is far more than the billions it costs to keep the “safe spaces” working. The real price is that, on the odd occasion, even when academics give good advice, people don’t believe them.

 

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