Medicine: War and Pestilence

In Europe’s bloody wars, for every ten men slain by the enemy, pestilence has killed its thousands. In the Thirty Years’ War, an estimated 8,000,000 Germans were wiped out by flea-borne bubonic plague and louse-borne typhus fever. On Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, typhus, dysentery and pneumonia killed 450,000 of the Grand Army’s 500,000 men.

World War I was the first war in history in which guns were more deadly than germs. Battlefield deaths totaled 8,000,000; deaths from disease, 3,000,000. Yet, despite the great achievements of medical science, disease was still a potent wartime killer. In 1914, typhus swept through Serbia, spread to Russia, where, in four years, it killed 3,000,000 peasants.

Today British and French doctors expect no epidemics of typhus, typhoid or cholera. Although there is no effective remedy for any of these diseases, all can be prevented by sanitary precautions. British soldiers are given inoculations against smallpox, tetanus, typhoid. But a titanic task faces the doctors of Germany and Central Europe.

Typhus and Typhoid. Carried by the louse and the rat-flea is Rickettsia prowazeki, a tiny organism which causes the dirty pink eruptions, burning fever and wild delirium of typhus fever. Prevention is simple: “no lice, no typhus.” Also louse-borne is trench fever, a milder relative of typhus, which made its first appearance in World War I.

Still to be tried on a mass scale are new typhus vaccines which have been produced independently by breeding Rickettsiae on chicken eggs, both by Harvard’s famed Bacteriologist Hans Zinsser and by Dr. Herald Rea Cox of the U. S. Public Health Service. About 8,000 doses of this new vaccine already have been sent to Hungary.

When the Germans moved into Poland last fall, they lugged with them portable shower baths, ran farm motors to make steam for delousing Polish prisoners. Because of these thorough precautions, there has been no large-scale typhus epidemic in louse-ridden Poland, although the disease has flickered there, as it has in China, for many years. Warsaw has suffered from typhoid fever, a disease quite different from typhus, transmitted by typhoid bacilli which lodge in human excrement, food, water.

Nor have the Finns been plagued with typhus. Bi-weekly steam baths are their chief protection. Dr. Herbert Alonzo Spencer of the U. S. Public Health Service, who recently spent a month traveling through Finland, believes that there is no danger of a typhoid epidemic.

Influenza. Greatest plague of World War I, if not the greatest in history, was the flu epidemic of 1918 which scourged every continent, almost every inhabited island. Throughout the world, more than 20,000,000 people died of it, 550,000 of them in the U. S.

Since influenza runs in cycles of some 20 years, some epidemiologists expect another great pandemic any year now. In recent months British doctors have anxiously watched flu graphs, but last week the British Medical Journal heaved a sigh of relief, announced that “this year’s epidemic certainly does not rank among the major visitations of recent years.”

Nutritional Disease. Doctors now fear above all else not germ plagues, but air raids and the scores of malnutrition diseases. These range from nerve destruction and insanity to sterility, night blindness, softening of the bones. Danes have not forgotten the terrible eye disease which swept their country in 1917, when they exported so much of their fresh butter, rich in Vitamin A. To forestall such eye trouble, margarine companies in Britain will fortify their products with the same proportion of vitamins found in butter.