Still no vaccine to Typhus, but it was beaten in overcrowded ghettos of Warsaw in 1941

For 450 years Typhus ravaged Europe. The death rate without antibiotics is somewhere from 10 – 40%.

Warsaw Ghetto workers

There is still no vaccine to typhus, but overcrowded ghettos of partially starving people managed to stop the spread in 1941. The Nazi’s crammed some 450,000 people into a 3.4km2 area in Warsaw. In the first round, typhus spread rapidly, infecting 120,000 people and killing 30,000. But the Jews got organized and just as everyone was expecting rates to rocket with winter approaching, the exponential curve fell off suddenly “to extinction”. A new paper claims they beat it with social distancing, hygiene, and home quarantine.

Typhus is due by a bacterium transmitted by lice and fleas. It causes a fever, headache and rash. It was such a scourge that in 1759 one estimate suggests as many as a quarter of all prisoners in England died from typhus. Infection rates were so bad in prison that the disease was called ‘goal fever’ and prisoners on trial would even infect court members from time to time. In the early 1600′s more than 10% of the total German population may have been killed by typhus. Currently it is infrequent except for in […]