Middle Ages The first reliable description of typhus appears in 1489 AD during the Spanish siege of
Baza against the
Moors during the
War of Granada (1482–1492). These accounts include descriptions of fever; red spots over arms, back, and chest; attention deficit, progressing to delirium; and
gangrenous sores and the associated smell of rotting flesh. During the siege, the Spaniards lost 3,000 men to enemy action, but an additional 17,000 died of typhus. In historical times, "jail fever" or "gaol fever" was common in English prisons, and is believed by modern authorities to have been typhus. It often occurred when prisoners were crowded together into dark, filthy rooms where lice spread easily. Thus, "imprisonment until the next term of court" was often equivalent to a death sentence. Prisoners brought before the court sometimes infected members of the court. The
Black Assize of Exeter 1586 was another notable outbreak. During the Lent assizes court held at
Taunton in 1730, gaol fever caused the death of the
Lord Chief Baron, as well as the
High Sheriff, the sergeant, and hundreds of others. During a time when persons were executed for capital offences, more prisoners died from 'gaol fever' than were put to death by all the public executioners in the British realm. In 1759, an English authority estimated that each year, a quarter of the prisoners had died from gaol fever.
Early modern epidemics Epidemics occurred routinely throughout Europe from the 16th to the 19th centuries, including during the
English Civil War, the
Thirty Years' War, and the
Napoleonic Wars. Pestilence of several kinds raged among combatants and civilians in
Germany and surrounding lands from 1618 to 1648. According to Joseph Patrick Byrne, "By war's end, typhus may have killed more than 10 percent of the total German population, and disease in general accounted for 90 percent of Europe's casualties."
19th century During
Napoleon's
retreat from Moscow in 1812, more French soldiers died of typhus than were killed by the Russians. A major epidemic occurred in
Ireland between 1816 and 1819, during the famine caused by a worldwide reduction in temperature known as the
Year Without a Summer. An estimated 100,000 people perished. Typhus appeared again in the late 1830s, and yet another major typhus epidemic occurred during the
Great Irish Famine between 1846 and 1849. The typhus outbreak along with
typhoid fever is said to be responsible for 400,000 deaths. The Irish typhus spread to England, where it was sometimes called "Irish fever" and was noted for its virulence. It killed people of all social classes, as lice were endemic and inescapable, but it hit particularly hard in the lower or "unwashed" social strata. In the
United States, a typhus
epidemic broke out in
Philadelphia in 1837 and killed the son of
Franklin Pierce (14th President of the United States) in
Concord, New Hampshire, in 1843. Several epidemics occurred in
Baltimore,
Memphis, and
Washington, DC, between 1865 and 1873. Typhus was also a significant killer during the
US Civil War, although
typhoid fever was the more prevalent cause of US Civil War "camp fever". Typhoid fever is caused by the bacterium
Salmonella enterica Serovar Typhi. In
Canada alone, the
typhus epidemic of 1847 killed more than 20,000 people from 1847 to 1848, mainly Irish immigrants in
fever sheds and other forms of quarantine, who had contracted the disease aboard the crowded
coffin ships in fleeing the
Great Irish Famine. Officials neither knew how to provide sufficient sanitation under conditions of the time nor understood how the disease spread.
20th century Typhus was
endemic in
Poland and several neighboring countries prior to
World War I (1914–1918), but became
epidemic during the war. Delousing stations were established for troops on the
Western Front during
World War I, including the use of
shower trains, but typhus ravaged the armies of the
Eastern Front, where over 150,000 died in
Serbia alone. Fatalities were generally between 10% and 40% of those infected and the disease was a major cause of death for those nursing the sick. In 1922, the typhus epidemic reached its peak in Soviet territory, with some 20 to 30 million cases in
Russia. Although typhus had ravaged
Poland with some 4 million cases reported, efforts to stem the spread of disease in that country had largely succeeded by 1921 through the efforts of public health pioneers such as
Hélène Sparrow and
Rudolf Weigl. In Russia during the
civil war between the
White and
Red Armies, epidemic typhus killed 2–3 million people, many of whom were civilians. In 1937 and 1938, there was a typhus epidemic in
Chile. On 6 March 1939, Prime Minister of France
Édouard Daladier stated to the French parliament, he would return 300,000 of the Spanish refugees fleeing from the 1938
Spanish Civil War; reasons included the typhus spread in the French refugee camps, as well as France's sovereign recognition of
Francisco Franco. During
World War II, many German POWs after the
loss at Stalingrad died of typhus. Typhus epidemics killed those confined to POW camps, ghettos, and
Nazi concentration camps who were held in unhygienic conditions. Pictures of mass graves including people who died from typhus can be seen in footage shot at
Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Among thousands of prisoners in concentration camps such as
Theresienstadt and Bergen-Belsen who died of typhus File:Charles Nicolle at microscope.jpg|
Charles Nicolle received the 1928
Nobel Prize in Medicine for his identification of lice as the transmitter of epidemic typhus. File:DDT WWII soldier.jpg|A US soldier is demonstrating
DDT hand-spraying equipment. DDT was used to control the spread of typhus-carrying lice. File:CPS141ratpoison.jpg|A
Civilian Public Service worker distributes rat poison for typhus control in
Gulfport, Mississippi, around 1945. File:The Liberation of Bergen-belsen Concentration Camp, April 1945 BU4017.jpg|Women suffering from Typhus at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, shortly after liberation. Typhus rapidly spread in the unhygenic, crowded conditions of concentration camps.
21st century In 2018 a murine typhus outbreak spread through
Los Angeles County, primarily affecting homeless people. In 2019, city attorney Elizabeth Greenwood revealed that she was infected with typhus from a flea bite at her office in
Los Angeles City Hall. Pasadena also experienced a sudden uptick in typhus with 22 cases in 2018 but, without being able to attribute this to one location, the Pasadena Public Health Department did not identify the cases as an "outbreak". Over the past decade as well murine typhus cases have been rising with the highest number of cases being 171 in 2022. == References ==