Typhus: The Killer and the Cure 1

By Sherri Boomershine 

In my book, A Song for Her Enemies, Dutch Resistance workers, Dr. Daniel Feldman and his girlfriend, Tamar, sneak out of the ghetto to treat Typhus victims who are hiding in abandoned houses throughout the countryside. Typhus, an often-fatal bacterial disease that is spread by body lice, swept through Europe during the second world war, but it still exists.

• There are three types of Typhus: Murine typhus. Murine (or endemic) typhus exists in many areas of the world, including the U.S. and is spread by fleas. It tends to be milder than epidemic or scrub typhus.
• Epidemic typhus is most common in parts of Africa, Central America and South America. Body lice spread epidemic typhus. There are some cases of epidemic typhus in the U.S., usually after exposure to infected flying squirrels.
• Scrub typhus. Scrub typhus exists in rural areas of Southeast and East Asia, the Pacific Islands, Russia and Australia. Chiggers (young mites) spread scrub typhus. 

 

 Some of the symptoms of Typhus are fever, body aches, headaches, cough, and a rash, which starts on the chest and spreads to the rest of the body, except for the hands and soles of the feet. Notable people who died of Typhus are writer, Charlotte Brontë (1855); Signer of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Rush (1825) ; and Emperor Alexander I of Russia (1813).

During World War II, Nazi propaganda portrayed Jews as major spreaders of the disease as a way of garnering public support for imprisoning them in ghettos. In November 1940, the Nazis walled more than 400,000 Jewish people inside a 3.4-square-kilometre ghetto in Warsaw, Poland. The overcrowded conditions, lack of sewage maintenance, and inadequate food and hospital resources meant that typhus rapidly infected about 100,000 people and caused 25,000 deaths.

 

However, Jewish people confined inside a Nazi ghetto during the second world war were able to curb a massive typhus outbreak by introducing similar infection control measures. By October 1941, just before the following winter, new typhus infections suddenly ground to a halt. This was unexpected, because typhus normally accelerated at the start of winter, and ghettos in other places like Ukraine were still being ravaged by the disease. “Many thought it was a miracle,” said Lewi Stone at RMIT University in Australia.

To find out how the Warsaw ghetto stamped out typhus, Stone and his colleagues examined historical documents from libraries around the world, including those kept by doctors who lived in the Warsaw ghetto. They discovered that doctors imprisoned there—including eminent microbiologist and Nobel prize nominee Ludwik Hirszfeld who helped discover different blood types—led community efforts to stop the disease from spreading. 

Hundreds of lectures were held in ghettos—wherever people were forced to gather—to educate the public about the importance of personal hygiene, social distancing, and self-isolating when sick. A secret university was also set up to train medical students in infection control, and community leaders helped to organize elaborate sanitation programs and soup kitchens. Mathematical modelling by Stone and his colleagues suggests that these measures prevented more than 100,000 typhus infections in the ghetto and tens of thousands of deaths.

 

Tragically, almost all the ghetto residents were later sent to die in extermination camps, which the Nazis tried to justify as a means to prevent future typhus outbreaks. Most notable victims were Ann Frank and her older sister, Margot at Bergen-Belson. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2249578  

Sherri Boomershine is a woman of faith who loves all things foreign whether it’s food, culture, or language. A former French teacher and flight attendant, her passion is traveling to the settings of her books, sampling the food, and visiting the sites. She visited a Netherlands concentration camp for A Song for Her Enemies, and Paris art museums for What Hides beyond the Walls. Sherri lives with her husband Mike, her high school sweetheart, whom she married fifty-five years later. As an author and editor, she hopes her books will entertain and challenge readers to live large and connect with their Savior. Join, chat, and share with her on social media. Newsletter Facebook Twitter Instagram Website

If the Nazis stole your house, wouldn’t you be justified in stealing it back?

Tamar Kaplan is a budding soprano with the Harlaam Opera company. Her future looks bright, despite the presence of the German soldiers guarding Haarlem. But when Nazi soldiers close down the opera company, families start disappearing in the middle of the night, and Jews are stripped of their freedoms, Tamar realizes her brother Seth was right about her naiveté. She joins the resistance, her blond hair and light features making it easy for her come and go under the watchful eyes of the German guards. Tamar becomes Dr. Daniel Feldman’s assistant, as they visit families hiding out in forests and hovels, tending to their health needs. But when she returns home to find her parents gone and the family store looted, she and Daniel must go into hiding.  As they cling to the walls of an alley, Tamar recognizes a familiar face—that of Neelie Visser, the neighbor, who beckons to them to follow her. Can she trust this Gentile woman who talks about God as if he’s standing next to her? https://bit.ly/40Yucjv