Word: typhus
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...American Expeditionary Force, before he was permitted to reembark for the U. S., was obliged to strip, scrub and dress in lice-free clothes. Only by such drastic means could Army doctors be sure of preventing the transmission to the U. S. of the louse-carried disease of typhus. And once typhus appears among dirty human beings huddled together in unclean army camps, trenches, jails, poorhouses, hospitals or ships, they die by thousands. Typhus, more than cold or Russians, made Napoleon retreat from Russia in 1812. In 1914 typhus killed 150,000 Serbs and 30,000 of their Austrian prisoners...
...Dyer developed a vaccine against flea-borne typhus. A few months later Dr. Hans Zinsser of Harvard produced a vaccine against louse-born typhus (TIME, March 13, 1933). Thus it became possible to inoculate armies against typhus, just as armies of the War and since have been regularly inoculated against typhoid and smallpox. But, although whole civilian populations have been gradually inoculated against smallpox, it remains a question whether under stress of war whole populations can be speedily immunized against typhus...
Last week this problem became acute. From the interior of China came a cry from an agent of the League of Nations sent there last autumn when a Chinese plague of cholera threatened the world (TIME, Oct. 25). As cholera subsided, typhus rose, wrung from League Sanitarian Herman H. Mooser a warning: "The danger is imminent. Refugees throughout Central China are simply filthy with typhus-carrying lice. All the Chinese soldiers in the Lung-hai area (see p. 17) are lousy. There are no Chinese delousing stations, and we are half crazy trying to get co-operation from Chinese military...
...been designed for human habitation, might have accommodated 500 persons . . . were quartered 9,000 refugees. . . . With no soap, no plumbing, no heat and excessive overcrowding, the place was foul. Women and children clotted and festered and hungered together. . . . Dirt, scabies and vermin exist to such an extent that typhus might become epidemic among them if it were to break...
...Passos saw famine and typhus in the Near East, talked over Bolshevik atrocities with Russian refugees, Turkish atrocities with Greeks and Armenians, English duplicity with Arabs. In Spain he was startled to hear a mountain peasant exclaim, "America is the world of the future." In Arabia a native told him owlishly that the English "were united and used their guns only to shoot strangers, while the Arabs were always squabbling among themselves and were very nice to strangers." Hating high-flown sentiments in all forms (he read Juvenal on the way to Damascus, did not like it because "I smell...