Word: typhus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...paper. One soldier who watched me wade ashore with this load said, 'Now I've seen everything.' " Thomas' burden was not a secret weapon but a collection of research animals; the Navy feared that troops on Okinawa would be endangered by a disease called scrub typhus, and Thomas' assignment was to study the dangers. That threat never materialized, so Thomas had to make do with an outbreak of Japanese B encephalitis. It was, he remembers, "the only game in town...
...discovery was made not by a man who hunts ordinary bacteria, but by a microbiologist who specializes in leprosy and rickettsial diseases like typhus and spotted fever. The latter are characterized by fever, headaches and general malaise and are caused by bacteria-like microorganisms usually carried by ticks, lice and fleas. But when Dr. Joseph McDade, 36, examined the lung tissue of victims of last summer's outbreak, he found no trace of any rickettsiae...
Microbes, like people, are always in a process of evolution. They have also proved marvelously mobile. They have marched with every army ever fielded, and claimed more victims than bronze spears, muskets or machine guns. From 1803 to 1815, Napoleon lost more of his men to typhus than he did to bullets or bayonets. During the Crimean War in 1854-56, disease killed ten times as many British soldiers as did Russian cannons. Even at the turn of our present century, British combat deaths during the Boer War were only a fifth as high as losses due to disease. Indeed...
There, each batch was subdivided into minute quantities needed by the many specialists-bacteriologists, virologists, parasitologists, rickettsiologists (for microbes that cause typhus and Rocky Mountain spotted fever), hematologists, lexicologists, and veterinarians. All the lab scientists and technicians wore protective masks, gowns and gloves and worked under exhaust hoods. But it was not felt necessary to invoke use of the sanctum sanctorum, the "hot lab," where only the deadliest organisms known to cause fast, fulminating and fatal diseases are handled...
...were common among the poor. Bathing was rare: one Quaker lady noted in her diary in 1799 that she withstood a shower bath "better than I expected, not having been wett all over at once, for 28 years past." Body lice were omnipresent, as was the disease they carried-typhus fever. Frequent births and poor obstetrics accounted for the high mortality in mothers; the death rate among black women served by midwives was lower than among whites served by physicians. Mental illness was seen as the work of the devil: the village idiot was either derided or tolerated, while...