War & Lice

Delousing stations (where soldiers bathed and their clothes were boiled) were part of the standard military equipment of the World War. Every member of the American Expeditionary Force, before he was permitted to reembark for the U. S., was obliged to strip, scrub and dress in lice-free clothes. Only by such drastic means could Army doctors be sure of preventing the transmission to the U. S. of the louse-carried disease of typhus. And once typhus appears among dirty human beings huddled together in unclean army camps, trenches, jails, poorhouses, hospitals or ships, they die by thousands. Typhus, more than cold or Russians, made Napoleon retreat from Russia in 1812. In 1914 typhus killed 150,000 Serbs and 30,000 of their Austrian prisoners. The plague spread to Russia, where it infected 25,000,000, killed 3,000,000, and made Hindenburg fear to move German troops from his Polish front to his French front. Today few U. S. residents know anything of the disease or of the dirty pink eruptions, high fever, delirium and terrific death toll peculiar to typhus fever.*Half-a-dozen years ago, however, Dr. Rolla Eugene Dyer of the U. S. Public Health Service, coming out of a hospital, weak, emaciated and quavering, revealed that he had contracted typhus from fleas, a cage of which he had worn for the sake of experiment taped to his leg. The fleas came from rats. And that explained the mode of transmission of a mild type of typhus fever (Brill's disease) which exists endemically on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts from New York to Louisiana (TIME. Nov. 7, 1932).

Dr. Dyer developed a vaccine against flea-borne typhus. A few months later Dr. Hans Zinsser of Harvard produced a vaccine against louse-born typhus (TIME, March 13, 1933). Thus it became possible to inoculate armies against typhus, just as armies of the War and since have been regularly inoculated against typhoid and smallpox. But, although whole civilian populations have been gradually inoculated against smallpox, it remains a question whether under stress of war whole populations can be speedily immunized against typhus.

Last week this problem became acute. From the interior of China came a cry from an agent of the League of Nations sent there last autumn when a Chinese plague of cholera threatened the world (TIME, Oct. 25). As cholera subsided, typhus rose, wrung from League Sanitarian Herman H. Mooser a warning: "The danger is imminent. Refugees throughout Central China are simply filthy with typhus-carrying lice. All the Chinese soldiers in the Lung-hai area (see p. 17) are lousy. There are no Chinese delousing stations, and we are half crazy trying to get co-operation from Chinese military and civilian officials. Members of my mission are doing what they can but we are practically without supplies."

From Spain last week came another warning. In a report to the New York Times, Alfred Winslow Jones wrote about "the increasingly dirty and hungry people, of warrens where many civilian refugees are housed. ... In an incompleted factory building which, had it been designed for human habitation, might have accommodated 500 persons . . . were quartered 9,000 refugees. . . . With no soap, no plumbing, no heat and excessive overcrowding, the place was foul. Women and children clotted and festered and hungered together. . . . Dirt, scabies and vermin exist to such an extent that typhus might become epidemic among them if it were to break out."

Last month in the French L'Illustration three French Army doctors declared that in case of war, germs could be introduced into enemy territory by loosing infected rats, fleas and lice. Having chosen the harmful war germ, the army employing it would immunize its own men in advance.

*Not to be confused with typhoid fever, which produces somewhat similar symptoms, and in addition violent intestinal disturbances. Typhoid comes from infected food and drink.

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