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Typhus, also known as typhus fever, is a group of infectious diseases that include epidemic typhus, scrub typhus, and murine typhus. [1] Common symptoms include fever
Epidemic typhus, also known as louse-borne typhus, is a form of typhus so named because the disease often causes epidemics following wars and natural disasters where civil life is disrupted. [ 4 ] [ 5 ] Epidemic typhus is spread to people through contact with infected body lice , in contrast to endemic typhus which is usually transmitted by fleas .
[13] [14] (R. prowazekii is a causative bacterium of epidemic typhus first discovered by American physicians Howard Taylor Ricketts and Russell M. Wilder in 1910, and described by a Brazilian physician Henrique da Rocha Lima in 1916. [15]) The taxonomic confusion worsened.
Typhus is a different disease, caused by unrelated species of bacteria. [20] Owing to their similar symptoms, they were not recognized as distinct diseases until the 1800s. "Typhoid" means "resembling typhus". [21]
In 1910, Ricketts became interested in a strain of murine-carried typhus known as tabardillo due to a major outbreak in Mexico City, and the apparent similarity of the disease to spotted fever. [1] Days after isolating the organism that he believed caused typhus, he himself died of the disease. [4]
He discovered the specific bacteria-dissolving immune bodies in cholera and typhus. The British pathologist Almroth Wright is generally credited with the initiation of typhoid vaccination in 1896. His claims of priority were challenged as early as 1907 in favour of Richard Pfeiffer.
Henrique da Rocha Lima, a Brazilian doctor, discovered this bacterium in 1916. He named it after his colleague Stanislaus von Prowazek, who had died from typhus in 1915. Both Prowazek and Rocha Lima had been infected with typhus while studying its causative agent in a prisoner-of-war camp hospital in Cottbus, Germany. [2]
Mary Mallon was born in 1869 in Cookstown, County Tyrone, Ireland.She may have been born with typhoid fever as her mother was infected during pregnancy. [5] [6] [7] In 1884 at the age of 15, she emigrated from Ireland to the United States.