Typhus Vaccine

The U. S. Public Health Service and its National Institute of Health last week marked a specific treatment for typhus fever on the Scoreboard of Federal research in medicine.

The disease has been a recognized pestilence since the 5th Century B.C. when Thucydides described its decimation of Athens. Three hundred years ago experimental medicine, then in its formative stage, recognized that the body louse ("cootie") carried typhus fever from one person to another.

Typhus fever usually manifests itself by a sudden chill and a rise of body temperature to 104DEG or 105DEG F. Temperature remains at that exhausting height for 13 or 14 days. Until the ninth day the victim usually is nauseated, has wracking headache. About the ninth day the headache fades, delirium ensues. The patient is apt to be wild and active, or he may be capable of only low, incoherent mutterings. He cannot sleep; he trembles constantly; he is deeply prostrated. If he is to die, death ensues usually between the ninth and twelfth days. Otherwise on the 13th or 14th day, the high fever suddenly drops to normal, all symptoms rapidly disappear.

From the third to the fifth day of the fever dirty pink spots appear--first on the abdomen and upper chest, then on the back, then rapidly all over the body. Soon the spots become rusty pink. Some of them darken to purple, blue, brown, then disappear.

The spots of typhus fever and of typhoid fever often look alike and account for an ancient confusion of the two distinct diseases. There is a simple way to distinguish between the two. When pressed down by a piece of glass, typhoid spots disappear from sight completely. Typhus spots when similarly squeezed become pale but do not disappear.

There is a mild type of typhus, the kind which ordinarily persists in the U. S. Spots of mild typhus resemble the spots of a fading case of measles. Measles spots look like flea bites, are more florid than typhus spots. Measles attack the face, palms and soles. Typhus very seldom does that.

Typhus has persisted in cities along the U. S. Atlantic and Gulf coast despite sanitary precautions. It has at times erupted in communities without a lousy inhabitant. Perhaps some other bug transmits the disease, thought Dr. Rolla Eugene Dyer of the Public Health Service. With associates he began the study of typhus ab initio.

First important new fact which the investigators found was that many Eastern coastal cases diagnosed as typhus were really Rocky Mountain spotted fever, never before suspected east of the Mississippi (TIME, March 9, 1931).

The louse carries a violent, epidemic form of the disease common in Europe. In the U. S. typhus is milder and endemic, travels in the rat flea.

Dr. Dyer & associates, having determined that the flea as well as the louse is a carrier of typhus, concentrated on treatments. They pulverized infected fleas, rubbed the mash into scratches which they made on the bodies of monkeys and guinea pigs. When Dr. Dyer's staff let typhus fleas bite the vaccinated animals, typhus fever developed in only half the animals. Whereupon the investigators prepared a more potent vaccine with which they will inoculate themselves. They are confident that at last they have the treatment and preventive of typhus as it appears in the U. S.

In Washington Surgeon General Hugh Smith Gumming of the U. S. Public Health Service and Joseph Eugene Ransdell of Louisiana who as Senator from Louisiana got the National Institute of Health established, separately announced that Federal investigators are now working on cancer, leprosy, malaria, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, pellagra, trachoma, tularemia, meningitis, infantile paralysis, heart disease, undulant fever, child hygiene, industrial hygiene, milk sanitation, stream pollution, water purification.

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