“CRAWLING DEATH”

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21400, 10 May 1944, Page 2

“CRAWLING DEATH”

CONQUEST IN NAPLES

MEDICAL HISTORY MADE N.Z. OFFICER’S STORY Of the side-issues of war, none is likely to prove of greater interest to historians than the magnificent and successful light made by the Allied medical corps to wipe out typhus among the citizens of Naples. In the course of a few weeks, the Allied doctors and their staff?, including a body of British nurses who faced the horror of the “crawling death” for the sake of ex-enemy civilians, established the first victory in history over an epidemic having, its roots in an active theatre of war.

Early in March, during a visit to Naples, Colonel A. S. Muir encountered some of the R.A.M.C. officers working on this campaign, and from them he secured some first-hand accounts of the manner in which typhus took hold, and how it was fought with terrific energy and an unstinted outlay of Allied funds. Apart from, the benefit to the Italian civilians the conquest of the outbreak was of the utmost importapce to the incoming Allied troops, as the spread of the infection might well have crippled them in the use of Naples and other Italian cities. From his conversations with R.A.M.C. officers, Colonel Muir gives a brief outline of the campaign. Before the war, and probably throughout the greater part of its history, Naples was infamous for its poverty and its slums. Many thousands of its people were living on the bread-line, and many thousands more below the subsistence level. Conditions were such that people living in New Zealand cannot possibly visualise them. As the war progressed, the lot of these Neapolitans became worse, md when the final horror of the Allied bombing, and the Nazi destruction of the city’s services came upon them, a large proportion became homeless. In these conditions, typhus was offered an ideal target. Atmosphere of the Grave Under the Via Roma, 200 ft. down, there is an old system of tunnels known as catacombs, from which much of the building material of Naples was secured in past centuries. An R.A.M.C. officer described it as a huge gallery, ynth many offshoots, cold and dingy, and with the atmosphere of the grave. Thousands of people sought refuge there from the bombing, and remained there after their miserable homes above ground were demolished. Some family groups endeavoured to maintain privacy and some degree of decency by erecting hutments in the galleries, but many others simply resigned themselves to misery and indiscriminate huddling in the open tunnels. v . There they remained for weeks, their terror of the Allied bombing being succeeded by the worse terror of the vengeful Nazis after tfie capitulation. Uneducated, in the mam, and completely ignorant of the rudiments of sanitation; they lived through an existence in which washing and cleansing were unknown. Their clothes, ragged before they went into the catacombs, became rags; their billets stank with indescribable filth. Even before the Allies entered Naples the first symptoms of the typhus epidemic had made .their appearance. Allied medical officers were mobilised to fight the spread of the crawling death. A special antityphus team was rushed from the United States, and a special disinfestation team headed by a Rockefeller Foundation supervisor followed. The Italian civilian hospitals, on inspection, were found to contain 25 per cent of patients carrying the tvphus-bearing louse. Antityphus serum was flown in, and antilouse dusting powder was .supplied in huge quantities. Centres were opened where civilians could receive preventive treatment. All civilians employed by the army were rigorously inspected and given this treatment. Centre of Infestation The disease for a time developed at the rate of about 50 new cases per day, and these were treated by Allied army personnel, nursed by British nursing sisters who had volunteered for this dangerous task, a .truly noble effort for ' the sake of infected Italian civilians. At this time the catacomb populations numbered between 10,000 and 30,000—the tally, was never complete —and as their habitat was considered to be the focal'centre of the' infection, the campaign was turned on in full force to deal with this pesthole. UnfortunteTy, many of the people concerned were, of the class which Fascism had deliberately neglected to educate, and great difficulty was experienced in making them realise how vital it was to establish and maintain sanitation and clealihess. They very* greatly resented' the de-lousing measures, in particular. Nevertheless, by, the first week in January the control measures were well in train, and soon about 3,■600,000 civilians had been dusted and supplied with tins of the effective anti-louse powder. Very soon supplies of the powder were being sold on the black market, and a friend of Colonel Muir’s brought in the Via Roma a tin which had contained powder but which had been rd-filied with'fine sail'd!' Before long the graph of admissions to typhus 'hospitals commenced to droo. and this was a heartenihg occasion for the anti-typhus squads. For the first time ip the history of medicine and the history of war, a potentially devastating outbreak of disease had been rapidly and effectively beaten. Only One Allied Casualty

Perhaps the most valuable result, Colonel Muir commented, was that in' the Allied armies there was only one case of typlius. That was a deserter who was picked up drunk in a slum area, with his - body liberally be-sprinkled with lice. “I‘ have seen' the results of the good job done by ftju.ssolni in colonising Cyrenaica, and I have seen .the mpdel farm area around Foggia, but that was Fascist window-dressing, i now feel sure,” adds the writer. “In Naples are many monuments to stalwart Italians, but one has only to wander a few streets off the main thoroughfares to see women with wizened children, and ill-nourished, dirty men in ah atmosphere of squalor and direst poverty. There one realises that Mussolini missed the really big job—that of putting in order the slums of Naples and, I suppose, of the other big Italian cities."