Word: typhus
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Puzzling is the constant (endemic) presence of mild typhus fever in a certain few sections of the U. S. Hospitals in the Atlantic Coast cities from Boston south always have a few cases. They appear in the Piedmont section of the Carolinas. Alabama, Georgia and Florida have quite the largest number sick with typhus. But Mississippi or Louisiana have had none reported to health officers. Tampa, Pensacola, Mobile, Galveston and Houston (among Gulf cities) have had their mild affliction, and the lower Rio Grande Valley from Laredo to Mercedes. On the Pacific Coast only Los Angeles has reported a considerable...
...endemics are so sharply limited disconcerts epidemiologists. They have long believed typhus an acute disease, carried from one person to another directly or by mediancy of head or body lice. But when they studied the Montgomery, Ala., district, the worst typhus focus in the U. S., they found the whites and Negroes of that region as little lousy as the whites and Negroes of the more northerly Birmingham district. Indeed body lice are almost unknown in Alabama, although head lice are found occasionally in school children. Lice apparently are not responsible for Montgomery typhus. In places further south the health...
Only a guess can be made as to the cause of this peculiar typhus endemic; and no one up to last week had made that guess. Some agency other than man and his lice would appear to be responsible for the long preservation of the typhus virus in those limited districts. That agency, be it insect alone or an insect which feeds on some host other than man, must be correspondingly limited in its distribution. Or at least its capacity for acting as a vector to man must be so limited...
...death rate of this mild endemic typhus is very low, one death in about every 500 cases. The death rate of epidemic typhus is very high, on the average 100 in every 500 cases. In filthy crowded districts, like Serbia during the first years of the War, the rate goes to 300 out of every 500 cases. Victims develop high fever (104 degrees & 105 degrees), chills, vomiting, headache, delirium, exhaustion, toxemia, death...
...Public Health Service, discoverer of "vitamin PP" as a preventive of pellagra (disease resulting from unbalanced diet); of hypernephroma, a malignant growth on the kidneys resembling cancer; in the Naval Hospital, Washington, D. C. A martyr to science, he had within 15 years investigated and contracted the following diseases: typhus fever (Mexico City), yellow fever (New Orleans), bone-breaking fever (Brownsville...