Plague No. 1

In the summer of 430 B. C. a plague which later historians took for typhus killed 300 Athenian knights, 45,000 Athenian citizens, 10,000 Athenian freemen. Survivors lost fingers, toes, eyesight, memory. Athenian life was completely demoralized.

Beginning in 540 A. D. and lasting some 50 years, another plague surged around the Mediterranean Sea. Deaths in Constaninople reached 10,000 a day.

In 1527, typhus accompanied the sack of Rome by Charles V's troops. Wrote Villa, an invading Spaniard: "In Rome no Dells sound; no church is open; no mass is read. There are no Sundays and no holidays. The rich shops of the merchants are used as stables; the most beautiful palaces are devastated. Houses burn and the streets are heaps of manure. The stench of the corpses is dreadful, and in the churches I have seen dead bodies gnawed by dogs. Mercenaries are dicing for heaps of ducats in the streets. I can compare it to nothing that I know of except the destruction of Jerusalem."

Typhus, more than cold or Russian bullets, made Napoleon retreat from Moscow. Cold, hungry soldiers lay in their own filth on rotten straw. According to de Kirckhoff, a corps surgeon, despairing men ate leather and even human flesh.

In 1914 typhus broke out in Serbia. In six months it killed 150,000 Serbs, 30,000 Austrian prisoners. Spreading to Russia, it infected 25,000,000 people, killed 3,000,000. Hindenburg feared to move German troops from the infected Russian border to the Western front.

Such were some of the historic manifestations of the terrifying might of typhus which Harvard's Professor Hans Zinsser, foremost U. S. authority on the disease, details in his Rats, Lice & History, published this week by Little, Brown & Co. Week before publication Dr. Zinsser sailed for France to lecture at the University of Paris.

Most historians consider typhus one of the oldest of human scourges, running back even beyond the Golden Age of Greece. Dr. Zinsser does not agree with them. According to his thesis, the disease developed among wild rats in the Orient, did not reach Europe as a human epidemic until the 15th Century. In the five subsequent centuries. Professor Zinsser calculates that typhus has caused more death and misery than cholera, bubonic plague, leprosy, tuberculosis, or any other human pestilence. Therefore he rates this mass disease as Plague No. 1, born in filth and spread by vermin.

The transmitters of Plague No. 1 are the rat-flea and the human louse. These greedy insects suck in the virus of typhus from the blood of their hosts, pass the disease on at their next feeding point. The viruses of rat and human typhus are slightly different. But when either gets into a human being's blood they cause precisely the same symptoms.

Dr. Zinsser describes the disease as follows:

"The initial stages resemble closely those of severe influenza. The temperature rises rapidly, often to from 103DEG to 104DEG F., with chills, great depression, weakness, pains in the head and limbs. The eruption appears on the fourth or fifth day after the onset and, except in times of epidemic, the diagnosis is extremely difficult in the pre-eruptive stage. As the eruption appears, the fever is apt to rise. The rash usually begins on the shoulders and trunk, extending to the extremities, the backs of the hands and feet, and sometimes to the palms and soles. It becomes more abundant during the subsequent days, but it is seen very rarely on the face and forehead. It is at first composed of pink spots which disappear on pressure, but soon these become purplish, more deeply brownish red, and finally fade into a brown color. ... A symptom of considerable importance, early and rarely missed, is the severe headache which is apt to be more unbearable in this disease than in other acute fevers. . . . When the rash, together with fever and headache, delirium and extreme weakness, is clearly described, typhus is easily recognized; but it must be remembered that the rash in the mild, isolated endemic cases--and especially among children--may be so slight and transient that often it is not noticed at all by the physician unfamiliar with the disease. For this reason, until typhus becomes epidemic, individual cases may often remain unrecognized."

When an attack of typhus is mild it probably is due to the bite of a rat-flea. In human blood rat-typhus virus may be transformed, by ways which bacteriologists have not discovered, into human-typhus virus which in turn is transmitted by lice in a much more virulent form. Professor Zinsser two years ago invented a vaccine to prevent human typhus (TIME, March 13, 1933). Before that, Dr. Rolla Eugene Dyer of the U. S. Public Health Service invented a vaccine to protect humans against rat typhus (TIME, Nov. 7, 1932). Though the mortality rate of typhus under normal circumstances is low, it does run as high as 60% in a severe epidemic. An attack lasts about two weeks, leaves no marked after effects. Though Plague No. 1 is nowhere epidemic at the moment, Professor Zinsser warns: "Typhus is not dead. It will live on for centuries, and it will continue to break into the open whenever human stupidity and brutality give it a chance, as most likely they occasionally will. But its freedom of action is being restricted, and more and more it will be confined, like other savage creatures, in the zoological gardens of controlled diseases. . . .

"In this--unlike most other matters of international interest--the whole world has cooperated against the common enemy. French, Swiss, American, British, German, Brazilian, Japanese, Chinese, Russian and Mexican investigators have worked together, cheered each other on and helped one another in friendly rivalry. . . ."

Today typhus is endemic in the Southeastern U. S., Mexico, Ireland, the Balkans, the Malay States.

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