Typhus Time

Typhus is at present no menace to the U.S. But it might conceivably become the dreaded scourge it is in Europe.

The heavy U.S. typhus season was just beginning last week, and the best guess was that 1944 would break all records. The mild U.S. variety of the disease (fever, rash, aches, prostration) was in creasing in Texas, Alabama, Georgia, Florida and North and South Carolina, the total of 3,091 cases being 600 ahead of the same period last year. Last year's total: 4,533. (Some experts thought the real figure would be nearer 45,000 if doctors did not often diagnose the disease as measles, typhoid fever, scarlet fever, pneumonia.)

In Birmingham, which has had over 50 cases so far this year compared with a prewar annual average of five, Health Officer Dr. George Ames Denison said that the typhus-infested rats which spread the disease are flourishing on wartime neglect in food shops, restaurants and garbage. Most Birmingham cases are workers in a five-block food and grain market section. Part of the trouble is the shortage of garbage cans and lids. Dr. Denison is especially worried by the fact that the rats are daily carrying germs in & out of town on trucks and railroad cars.

The Danger. The U.S. endemic (localized) typhus kills only about 1% of its victims, mostly old people. But the same bacterium-like organism can cause the terrible European epidemic typhus, which is spread by human lice and kills from 5 to 70% of its victims, depending on the virulence of the organism. Apparently, living with a louse makes the germ vicious.

The U.S. has been saved thus far from a typhus epidemic by being relatively louse-free, especially in the South, where clothing is light. To date, moreover, the disease has been confined to the South. But if it traveled north it might enter its dangerous phase among warmly clad slum dwellers who get lousy in winter. And such northward travel might well happen in a wartime year when there is great opportunity for travel and little time for rat killing.

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