Word: typhus
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...largest cities and the most important industrial centres the food supply has been reduced below what are generally regarded as the minimum requirements, and even in the favored localities there has been much distress. The almost inevitable consequence has been an increased death rate from such maladies as typhus, dysentery, dropsy and various infantile disorders...
Since lice are well known to transmit typhus, Santiago went in for city-wide delousing. Theatres were disinfected every night. So were dance halls, until Santiago authorities reflected that slow, intimate Chilean tangoes would be just right for spreading typhus. Abruptly all dance halls, billiard parlors and swimming pools in the capital were closed...
Even Chile's courageous President Arturo Alessandri, "The Lion of Tarapaca," worried about body lice last week, bathed with unusual frequency and spurred Santiago health officials in their zealous efforts to stamp out a typhus epidemic...
Fortunately the Chilean epidemic is typhus of a type milder than the type that sometimes scourges Europe. Over 100 Santiagoans had died last week, but hundreds were recovering when Valparaiso, chief port of Chile, clamored for protection. President Alessandri's typhus fight ers established delousing stations on all roads leading out of the capital under a presidential decree declaring a state of siege. At these barriers simple pedestrians and their clothing were thoroughly disinfected, not without loud protests. Wealthier Santiagoans passed through on certificates issued by their doctors...
...question arose at Dallas what diseases the traveler in Mexico, the West Indies, Central and South America need guard against. General advice was, as for travel anywhere, to take precautionary inoculations against smallpox and typhoid. Often threatening are bacillary and amebic dysentery, typhus, bubonic plague (a milder form than in the Orient), yellow fever, malignant malaria, and in the seaports venereal disease. Country people exhibit comparatively little venereal disease. On the other hand, mainly because they go barefoot and tend to wash little, they are subject to the tropical fevers and sores. Oroya fever and Andean Wart are peculiar...