DEADLY KILLER

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIV, Issue 42, 19 February 1943, Page 2

DEADLY KILLER

TYPHUS IN EUROPE

TERRIBLE TOLL IN LAST WAR

Another deadly killer is loose in Europe. A recent cable reported that typhus had broken out among German troops on the Russian frontSince the war began, typhus has taken its toll each winter, killing a f6w score here, a few hundred there, some thousands in all. For typhus, that is nothing. When it goes on the rampage it slaughters on a. greater scale than Hitler, In the last war the best estimates give it 3,000,000 victims in Russia, one of its firmest strongholds. In the last war, too, it froze one front completely for six months. In 1915 it was striking 1500 Serhians a day, crippling the Serb Army. But it was a better defender of Serbia than healthy soldiers; the Austrians, with virtually no human opposition to stop them, did not dare advance and expose their own armies to the typhus-bearing lice that crept on the bodies of the Serbs. In that great epidemic, typhus killed 160,000 Serbs and 60,000 Austrian prisoners. "Rats, Lice and History" Those dead are now forgotten, but so long as typhus still exists, and after, one of the men who worked among them will be remembered. He was Hans Zinsser, whose book, "Rats, Lice and History," is for laymen as well as for experts one of the most stimulating a scientist has produced. It is because the louse bears typhus that Europe' is now under the shadow of the disease. Armies which must be warmly clad to bear the continental cold, which have no proper washing facilities, and which are already weakened by the strain of war, live with the louse as their closest and constant companion. In days and in countries where the institution of the bath was not popular, typhus flourished in peacetime. It caused in England the "black assizes," when judges, lawyers and juries caught it from criminals. And the criminals lived in quarters so infested that typhus was known as gaol fever. It had other aliases, notably ship fever. The rat and the louse throve in the pestilential conditions of early ships, particularly convict ships. Typhus was the killer of many a convict whose body was dropped overboard on the voyage from England to Australia. Once it broke out among convicts at Hobart—that was a century ago. Russia used to be. the worst typhus country in Europe, but the improvement in hygiene and living conditions of the last 20 years have kept it in check there as never before. Just how large are the pockets that must surely remain is' one of the big questions that no one outside the Soviet can answer.

Another Soviet Virtue? It was thought until recently that the Russian Army was likely to be the first and worst sufferer. Now that other virtues have been found to exist in unexpected quantities in the , Red Army, some military hygiene experts suspect that their branch of war may be as advanced among the Russians as are, for instance, artillery and mechanisation. There is in Germany no large number of recovered typhus victims, and the Germans arte reported to have failed in their attempts to secure artificial immunity by vaccination. But scores of millions of people all over Europe cannot be vaccinated now; the task is too big for the time. And, ironically, it is reported that the Germans themselves Cannot benefit by it. The American method of preparing the vaccine was disclosed to the world just before the war, so that the Germans know it. But many of their best scientists in this field happened to have been Jews, and were therefore no longer available for the huge task of preparing enough vaccines, under the proper conditions for immunising the army. With a proper contempt for culture and learning, the Nazis had filled some of the highest medical posts with good party men who didn't happen to be such good scientists. The result, again according to official American advice, is that their vaccines are not yet being mass-pro-duced, and only medical and sanitary personnel have been immunised. If the fourth horseman rides, he will not stop at frontiers. And ft* typhus strikes, Europe will know days infinitely more tragic even than to-day.