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. Epidemic typhus is spread to people through contact with infected body lice, in contrast to endemic typhus which is usually transmitted by fleas.
Louse is the common name for any member of the clade Phthiraptera, which contains nearly 5,000 species of wingless parasitic insects. Phthiraptera has variously been recognized as an order, infraorder, or a parvorder, as a result of developments in phylogenetic research.
Hans Zinsser was an American physician, bacteriologist, and prolific author. The author of over 200 books and medical articles, he was also a published poet. Some of his verses were published in The Atlantic Monthly. His 1940 publication, As I Remember Him: the Biography of R.S., won one of the early National Book Awards, the sixth and last annual award for Nonfiction voted by members of the American Booksellers Association.
Rudolf Stefan Jan Weigl was a Polish biologist, physician and inventor, known for creating the first effective vaccine against epidemic typhus. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Medicine each year between 1930 and 1934, and from 1936 to 1939.
The year 1935 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.
Charles Jules Henri Nicolle was a French bacteriologist who received the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his identification of lice as the transmitter of epidemic typhus.
Rolla Eugene Dyer was an American physician born in Delaware County, Ohio. Dyer received his B.A. in 1907 from Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, and his M.D. in 1914 from the University of Texas. He joined the U.S. Public Health Service in 1916.
The Plague of Athens was an epidemic that devastated the city-state of Athens in ancient Greece during the second year of the Peloponnesian War when an Athenian victory still seemed within reach. The plague killed an estimated 75,000 to 100,000 people, around one quarter of the population, and is believed to have entered Athens through Piraeus, the city's port and sole source of food and supplies. Much of the eastern Mediterranean also saw an outbreak of the disease, albeit with less impact.
Emil "Tom" Frei III was an American physician and oncologist. He was the former director and former physician-in-chief of the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Massachusetts. He was also the Richard and Susan Smith Distinguished Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
Wilhelm Siegmund Frei was a German dermatologist best known for his contributions to Durand-Nicolas-Favre disease, a sexually transmitted disease found mainly in tropical and subtropical climates. He is also known for the Frei Test, which was developed in 1925 for the detection of lymphogranuloma venereum (LGV).
The discipline of medical entomology, or public health entomology, and also veterinary entomology is focused upon insects and arthropods that impact human health. Veterinary entomology is included in this category, because many animal diseases can "jump species" and become a human health threat, for example, bovine encephalitis. Medical entomology also includes scientific research on the behavior, ecology, and epidemiology of arthropod disease vectors, and involves a tremendous outreach to the public, including local and state officials and other stake holders in the interest of public safety.
Nathan Edwin Brill was an American physician who, while at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, discovered Brill-Zinsser disease, a late relapse of epidemic typhus.
Frederick G. Zinsser was a resident of Hastings-on-Hudson, New York who established a chemical plant on the waterfront of the Hudson River called Zinsser & Company, which synthesized organic chemicals. The Zinsser plant was as one of the establishments contracted to produce mustard gas during the First World War.
Typhus, also known as typhus fever, is a group of infectious diseases that include epidemic typhus, scrub typhus, and murine typhus. Common symptoms include fever, headache, and a rash. Typically these begin one to two weeks after exposure.
Rickettsia typhi is a small, aerobic, obligate intracellular, rod shaped gram negative bacterium. It belongs to the typhus group of the Rickettsia genus, along with R. prowazekii. R. typhi has an uncertain history, as it may have long gone shadowed by epidemic typhus. This bacterium is recognized as a biocontainment level 2/3 organism. R. typhi is a flea-borne disease that is best known to be the causative agent for the disease murine typhus, which is an endemic typhus in humans that is distributed worldwide. As with all rickettsial organisms, R. typhi is a zoonotic agent that causes the disease murine typhus, displaying non-specific mild symptoms of fevers, headaches, pains and rashes. There are two cycles of R. typhi transmission from animal reservoirs containing R. typhi to humans: a classic rat-flea-rat cycle that is most well studied and common, and a secondary periodomestic cycle that could involve cats, dogs, opossums, sheep, and their fleas.
Hélène Sparrow, was a Polish medical doctor and bacteriologist. She is best known for her work on the control of many epidemics including: typhoid fever, cholera, dysentery, and smallpox. Throughout the 1920s, Sparrow worked with the Polish Armed Forces at the State Institute of Hygiene in Warsaw. While at the State Institute of Hygiene, she worked vigilantly to produce the first vaccine against typhus and ran several large-scale vaccination campaigns to control the spread of diphtheria and scarlet fever all along the eastern frontiers of Poland. In 1933, Sparrow began to study flea-borne and louse-borne rickettsia diseases in Tunis, where she became the head of her own department at the Pasteur Institute. In her later years, she expanded her studies to include Mexico and Guatemala. While in Mexico and Guatemala, Sparrow developed a protective vaccine against typhus. She contributed a great amount of research to the World Health Organization on relapsing fever specifically in Ethiopia.
Diseases and epidemics of the 19th century included long-standing epidemic threats such as smallpox, typhus, yellow fever, and scarlet fever. In addition, cholera emerged as an epidemic threat and spread worldwide in six pandemics in the nineteenth century.
Gerald Weissmann was an Austrian-born American physician/scientist, editor, and essayist. He was Professor Emeritus and Research Professor of Medicine (Rheumatology) at New York University School of Medicine. He was editor-in-chief (2006–16) of The FASEB Journal. At the time of his death he was its book review editor. In 1965, he was one of the discoverers of liposomes and is credited with coining that term.
Emil Claus Gotschlich was an American physician-scientist, who was professor emeritus at the Rockefeller University. He was best known for his development of the first meningitis vaccine in 1970.
Wesley William Spink was an American physician, medical school professor, and medical researcher. He was "an internationally recognized authority on infectious diseases and is credited with controlling the spread of brucellosis ".
