MARTYRS TO SCIENCE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 150, 26 June 1937, Page 30 (Supplement)

MARTYRS TO SCIENCE.

Among the World's Unsung Heroes.

/ICTIMS OF THE DREADED TYPHUS BACCILUS.

(By WILLIAM C. McCLOY.) No. 11.

NEW YORK, May 16. TYPHUS is said to have the doubtful honour of having claimed more victims from the medical profession than any other germ. These victims are ■ill over the world—of all races—for lyphus is no respecter of persons or 11 laces. A winter disease, it likes cold climates hut it ran accommodate and adapt itself to unconventional conditions— assuming disguises not always recognisable at first. Its very causes are not constant. Several different kinds of germs with as many different carriers are responsible for typhus.

It is as fatal as it is widespread—6o l>er cent being the usual mortality in an I'pidemic. Rats are associated with 78 per cent of all cases of typhus.

Among recent investigators who lost their lives in the effort to solve the complexities of typhus (the Greek word for "stupor") were two South Americans —Dr. Jose Leraos Monteiro and his assistant, Dr. Edison Sauza Dantas. At Butantan Institute, Sao Paulo, Brazil, they were trying to combat anthematic typhus by working on guinea pigs with ticks inoculated with typhus. Dr. Dantas knew at once when he was bitten by a tick and went straight to the hospital, where he received every possible aid. Dr. Monteiro didn't know he was infected until the worst and most unmistakable symptoms appeared. Both men died in November, 1935.

A third South American, Dr. Augustin Duran, technician of the Biological Institute, Santiago, Chile, died of typhus on February 16, 1933, after contracting the disease while experimenting with vaccine. Many Serums Discovered. Many investigators have claimed the discovery of a serum for various forms of typhus, the most notable being Dr. Rolla Dyer of the Public Health Service, in Washington, D.C., in 1932; Dr. Hans Zinsser, Professor of Bacteriology at Harvard Medical School, in 1933; and the Metchnikoff Institute, Moscow, in 1934.

Years of lingering suffering due to voluntary inoculation with typhus germs resulted at last in the death of Wilfred Douchette in New Haven, on August 11, 1031. One of the protean, if less virulent, forms of typhus is the malady known as "trench fever," and Douchette, during the World War, had permitted himself to be inoculated with trench fever germs. For a year after his inoculation he lived in a French hospital corps, segregated from his companions, to return home after the Armistice, broken in health. A hopeless invalid, he was honoured before and after death as one who had risked his life for medical science.

Famine should take precedence of the other Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse—War, Pestilence and Death—for famine breeds them all.

Dr. Thomas B. McClintic, of Washington, D.C., was another distinguished scientist who his life for typhus research. Again Rocky Mountain fever was responsible. One of the first to study this modern and native phase of the ancient 'malady, Dr. McClintic was experimenting with vaccine in 1922 when he caught the disease and died. That he and all the others, including many unknown soldiers of the laboratory, have not died in vain is proved by the laboratory to-day maintained by the United States Government Health Service at Hamilton, Montana, where thousands of infected ticks are bred to provide a vaccine given free to cattlemen, ranchers and all others of the region who may apply. Rocky Mountain fever used to kill from 60 to 90 per cent of its victims. Modern Path Easier. The way of the investigator i» no longer hard. From Servetus, Spanish scientist and medicine's, first martyr, who first described accurately the circulation of the blood, and who was burned slowly—with green wood—as a heretic in Geneva in 1553, it is a far cry to Drs. Harvey and Jenner. They had merely to put up with abuse and ridicule—though there was plenty of both.

The principal contribution to medicine of the year 1931 was the isolation of the typhus germ. This was accomplished on May 4, 1931, by Dr. Zinsser and his assistant, Dr. Ruiz Castaneda, of Mexico. Two months previously, in March, 1931, Dr. Zinsser and his assistant had proved that low vitamin diet lowers resistance to typhus. "Home Stations." Dr. Zinsser had already contracted the dread disease during his experiments — 'he was one of the comparatively few who have recovered. Shortly after his attention was first turned to typhus, in 1929, he became infected. For weeks he hovered between life and death. When finally able to resume his researches he extracted serum from dead germs in rats and guinea pigs that should, he reasoned, immunise some cases and make the attack milder in others. This serum was announced officially in the annual report of Harvard's Medical School published on February 27, 1933, and it is undoubtedly the most successful serum for American typhus yet known. Dr. Zinsser's assistant in 1929 was Albert F. Batchelder, a young medical student from San Mateo, California. Like his chief, he also became infected and fell ill from the disease they were investigating. But young Batchelder did not recover. Another tragic death for which typhus research was directly responsible was that of Professor Howard Taylor Ricketts, of Chicago, in Mexico City, in 1910. Mexico is what is known as a "home station" for typhus in this country, just as the Balkans, Ireland, Poland, Russia, Egypt and virtually all the East are "home stations" to Europe's typhus investigators.

Proved Tick a Carrier. Just before his death Professor Ricketts was appointed to the University of Pennsylvania's chair of pathology, but he will be most clearly remembered for his gallant work, enabling him to prove that Rocky Mountain fever, a form of typhus indigenous to America, was conveyed to man by the bite of a tick from an infected animal. He had also proved that Mexico's "tarbillado fever" is really typhus, spread, as in Europe, by the body louse. By these discoveries he saved thousands of lives from the disease before succumbing to it himself.

Another scientist, Da Rocha Lima, in 1910, honoured Professor Ricketts by naming the newly-discovered typhus bacilli "Rickettsiae." These microorganisms are associated with most forms of typhus—"Ship fever" (as the eighteenth century, when typhus reaehed its greatest height known to history, called it); "gaol fever" (John Howard, the great prison reformer, died from typhus in 1770, having caught it during his visits to English prisons where it was rampant).; "Irish ague" (as the English term it); "sugumushi" (Japan's variety); "Brill's fever" (348 cases of this mild form of typhus Were found in New York's lower East Side in the early 'nineties); "Rocky Mountain fever" (known to Vermont and New Hampshire as well as to Idaho and Montana); "flevre boutonniere" (the French name); "Malta fever" (n name known to the Mediterranean region); typhoid and pain typhoid (poor relations of the original disease, but only a little less deadly); and "famine fever," a name the Chinese have for it and which is, perhaps, the moat exact.

Famine Should Come First. The English Prayer Book's Litany iM'secches to be delivered from "plague, pestilence and famine." Famine should come first, for plague and pestilence always follow in its wake, as they follow unemployment, poverty and war.

But it is a still further cry to our scientists of to-day, who are not only spared the etake and much of the old abuse and ridicule, but who may even escape the risks that once attended experimentation. Not only Dr. Zinsser, but a number of investigators have been stricken with typhus and yet recovered, their first-hand experience of the disease often aiding them in further research. When Dr. Dyer was seriously ill from typhus he used his own infected blood to feed fleas and prove that they could carry the American form of typhus. Drs. Maxcy and Workman were also stricken in the course of typhus research but survived. One of the few women in the Public Health Service, Alice Evans, suffered for seven years from "undulant fever" (a cousin of typhus, and not a very distant one), caught while studying the disease. She not only survived, but was able to prove that that form of the disease was carried by bacilli in unpasteurised milk.

Aa Argument for nudism. The louse transmission of European typhus to man was first discovered in 1009 by Dr. Charles Nicolle, French scientist and director of the Pasteur Institute at Tunis. His discovery—the first ray of light on a very dark subject—won him the Nobel Prize. In 1916 Nicolle and Blaiset found a cure for eruptive typhus, then ravaging Siberia.

At Buenos Ayres an army of tiny, highly-trained terriers now defend the city against rat-infested grain vessels, for rats carry both lice and fleas, and we know to-day that lice and fleas mean typhus. In the United States Government investigation of the many trailer camps throughout the country is promised. It is feared that the sanitary conditions in some of these camps might cause some form of typhus or typhoid.

Typhus has long played a curious part in politics. The death of Pericles, the fall of Rpme, the downfall of Charles I. of England—these and much more have been ascribed to typhus. Now it has entered diplomacy. Both in the Balkans and in South America typhus was lately made the excuse for closing a frontier.

There is no typhus in the South Sea Islands. Nor was there in Ethiopia during the late Italian campaign. Why? Because Mussolini's men marched stripped to the waist, and the carriers of typhus—body vermin—are rarely found where there are no clothes. Which is another argument for the nudists.— N.A.N.A.