Word: typhus
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Harvard last week took its place beside the U. S. Public Health Service as a victor in man's fight against typhus fever. Surgeon Rolla Eugene Dyer, U.S. P. H. S., after letting rat fleas feed on his leg, last year produced a vaccine efficacious against the mild, flea-borne typhus which occurs along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts (TIME, Nov. 7, et ante). Harvard's Professor Hans Zinsser has been developing a vaccine and serum against the louse-carried, virulent type of typhus which constantly threatens to invade the U. S. from Eastern Europe and Mexico. Last...
...Smith was one of four U. S. Public Health Service scientists whom Surgeon General Hugh Smith Gumming brought to Manhattan last week to lecture before the New York Electrical Society's science forum. The others: flea-bitten Dr. Rolla Eugene Dyer, discoverer of the cause of typhus fever in the U. S. (TIME, Nov. 7); tick-bitten Dr. Roscoe Roy ("Spenny") Spencer, who invented a new kind of vaccine (macerated insects which carry the virus of disease) and tried it out first on himself; Dr. Carl Voegtlin, pharmacologist, who has accumulated so many facts about the chemistry of cell...
...from vermin? No, Dr. Dyer would chuckle, and his friends seldom realized that he had ceased his joshing when he said, "They're fleas from a wild rat and I'm trying to see if they'll kill me." He was experimenting with flea transmission of typhus fever...
Last week Dr. Dyer, weak, emaciated and quavering, left Washington's Naval Hospital. One of his caged fleas carried a virulent form of typhus fever which had almost killed him, had kept him bed-ridden for a month. But he was contented. He had demonstrated something more about typhus fever. In Europe the body louse carries the virus of typhus fever, transmits a form of the disease which kills 22% to 65% of its victims. In the U. S. there has been a so-called mild form of typhus with a 2% mortality.* Dr. Dyer was instructed by Director...
...Because the louse is most active in winter when people bundle up and huddle together, European typhus is called winter typhus. The U. S. type is summer typhus, because fleas then are most active. (Fleas hibernate in winter...