Abstract
IN a recent communication to the permanent committee of the International Office of Public Health (Bull. Off. internat. d'hyg. publ., 30, 1780; 1938), Surgeon-General H. S. Cumming stated that endemic typhus transmitted by fleas, as distinct from classical typhus transmitted by lice, of which no case had occurred in the United States recently, was on the increase in the United States, where three thousand cases had been reported in 1937. In addition to an increase in the number of cases, there had been an extension of the disease into the interior of the country from its original foci on the Atlantic coast and Gulf of Mexico. Typhus was now being notified in the north of Alabama and Georgia and in Tennessee. In recent years, endemic typhus had shown a tendency to spread from the towns to the rural areas, especially those in which pea-nuts were grown on a large scale, which suggested that the grey rat, a well-known reservoir of the disease, was being attracted into the rural districts by this kind of food. Another reservoir of the disease was a native rodent known as the Oldfield mouse, and about a dozen other native rodents which had been found to be susceptible to infection by typhus were potential reservoirs of the disease. The case mortality of endemic typhus is below 5 per cent, most of the deaths occurring in patients more than fifty years of age.
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Typhus Fever in the United States. Nature 144, 149 (1939). https://doi.org/10.1038/144149a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/144149a0