Word: typhus
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Front, thanks to frequent delousing and other precautions, the cootie seldom brought anything worse than a comparatively mild infliction called trench fever. But to millions of Germans today as to other millions in many of history's wars, the cootie means horror and death in the form of typhus...
Napoleon, who lost 300,000 men in Russia, lost tens of thousands of them to typhus. On the Eastern Front last week Adolf Hitler, already suffering from the Russian winter, faced another of Napoleon's problems...
...louse feeds on human blood and abhors soap. But where there is no cleansing disturbance the louse flourishes&151;the female easily produces over 100 mature offspring in two months. Typhus epidemics begin when lice suck up typhus germs with the blood of infected human beings, carry the germs to others and infect them. The lice themselves eventually die of the disease they carry&151;after they have spread it among...
...typhus germ is called Rickettsia prowazeki, after Typhus Researchers Howard Taylor Ricketts and Stanislaus Prowazek. In feeding, the infected louse bows its head, pricks the skin with sharp stylets for bloodsucking, and meanwhile often excretes Rickettsiae on to the skin. When a victim scratches his itching louse bite, he is apt to infect himself by rubbing Rickettsiae into the scratch...
...vomits often, becomes delirious, sometimes maniacal. After three to five days, his dried skin shows angry rashes. His delirium increases until he lies unconscious, his tongue dry and brown, his pulse feeble. Often his temperature rises to 108-9°, and he dies. (In some epidemics 65% have died.) Typhus is frequently complicated by bronchitis, bronchopneumonia, gangrene, paralysis...