Word: typhus
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Europe's bloody wars, for every ten men slain by the enemy, pestilence has killed its thousands. In the Thirty Years' War, an estimated 8,000,000 Germans were wiped out by flea-borne bubonic plague and louse-borne typhus fever. On Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, typhus, dysentery and pneumonia killed 450,000 of the Grand Army...
World War I was the first war in history in which guns were more deadly than germs. Battlefield deaths totaled 8,000,000; deaths from disease, 3,000,000. Yet, despite the great achievements of medical science, disease was still a potent wartime killer. In 1914, typhus swept through Serbia, spread to Russia, where, in four years, it killed 3,000,000 peasants...
Today British and French doctors expect no epidemics of typhus, typhoid or cholera. Although there is no effective remedy for any of these diseases, all can be prevented by sanitary precautions. British soldiers are given inoculations against smallpox, tetanus, typhoid. But a titanic task faces the doctors of Germany and Central Europe...
...Typhus and Typhoid. Carried by the louse and the rat-flea is Rickettsia prowazeki, a tiny organism which causes the dirty pink eruptions, burning fever and wild delirium of typhus fever. Prevention is simple: "no lice, no typhus." Also louse-borne is trench fever, a milder relative of typhus, which made its first appearance in World...
...louse may be the greatest of war's horrors," the editorial opened. "By the disgust that it produces, by the sleeplessness that results from it, by the ubiquity of the skin lesions, and by the mortal disease [typhus fever] that it carries in its bite, it surpasses any. Because it is unremitting, the soldier dreads it more than artillery fire. . . . From the slow crawl of the louse over his body there is no respite. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow it will...