More than 70 years ago, a jailed community in Nazi-occupied Poland banded together to contain a deadly typhus epidemic, largely without the help of effective vaccines or medications. Instead, according to new research published today, they were likely based on measures such as education, improved sanitation, and even social distancing. According to the authors, some of the lessons learned from that epidemic could apply to our current pandemic.
Study author Lewi Stone, a mathematician at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, has been studying past and recent epidemics for more than 30 years, relying on mathematical models to chart how epidemics spread in a community. Three years ago, he encountered a typhus outbreak in the Warsaw Ghetto of occupied Poland, the largest camp that Nazi Germany established during World War II as a way to segregate the local Jewish population and other target groups, with up to 450,000 people living in a space of 1.3 square miles, or more than seven people on average per room. But to his knowledge, others had done little work to discover what this outbreak really was like.
“I began to review historical accounts and was surprised that this had been lost. There was a small amount of data, and as I traced it, I realized that this was incredibly important, ”Stone told Gizmodo.
Your team’s findings, published in Science Advances, it produced many surprises.
Epidemic typhus is a bacterium. disease known to plague humanity in times of trouble. It is transmitted by body lice that feed on the blood of infected people. When lice reach another host through direct contact or through clothing, their contaminated feces, or sometimes even their dead bodies, scratch at an opening in the skin, infecting the new person. Both body lice and typhus spread more easily in times of war, famine, or other situations where people crowd into small spaces with little regard for their health (although it is rare today, some forms of typhus it still occasionally causes outbreaks in prisons, for example.) Without treatment, it is routinely fatal, killing up to 40% of victims.
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Stone discovered that Typhus had been ravaging the residents of the Warsaw ghetto until October 1941. But then, it seemed to eerily lessen by the end of the year, just before winter, when typhus outbreaks historically worsened. Initially, Stone was concerned that death records in that time period might have been incomplete, but eventually found confirmation of a historian’s decline in the ghetto’s daily accounts. Nearby cities did not experience a similar fall in typhus that winter, indicating that something different was happening in Warsaw.
Although a somewhat effective typhus vaccine was invented shortly before the start of World War II, it may even have been smuggled In the Warsaw ghetto, few people are believed to have had access to it. And it would be decades before effective antibiotics for typhus became widely available. Therefore, to the best that Stone’s historical records and research can see, community members and doctors there are likely to rely on more outdated public health measures to stop the outbreak.
These measures included better sanitation and hygienehygiene practices by residents, reinforced by educational conferences that hundreds of people may have attended, according to rock. There were also reports from underground universities, where young people medical students received training on how to best respond to epidemic diseases such as typhus. And there was probably a certain social distancing, although I wouldn’t have considered something very novel at the time.
“It was like common knowledge: ‘Don’t go near someone with typhus because you don’t want to be the next person to get head lice,'” Stone said.
These measuresit is it only mitigated the devastation caused by typhus this yearand the Nazis actively sabotaged efforts to provide people with more food and other resources, worsening the lethality of the outbreak. Stone’s model suggests that around 100,000 people contracted typhus during that time, many of which were not reported, and played a significant role in the 80,000 to 100,000 deaths that his team also suspects occurred in 1941, along with famine. But they probably prevented a much worse outbreak that could have been two to three times larger, Stone said. Sadly, in 1942, many residents of the Ghetto began to be sent to the Nazi death camps that eventually killed millions of people.
Stone’s work started before the covid-19 pandemic, and the two diseases are different in very important ways (among other things, covid-19 is much less deadly than typhus, and spreads through respiration, not of lice). But he believes his team’s findings are especially timely.
“One conclusion would be that public health measures during an epidemic can be effective, even if you don’t realize they are working. In Warsaw, most people were starving and they probably didn’t know what was happening around them or what they were doing really helped, ”said Stone.
In studying the accumulation of the Warsaw outbreak, Stone also pointed to the role that stigmatization of minority communities played. The Nazis cited typhus as a reason to isolate Jewish residents in the ghettos, and guards shot people who tried to escape, sometimes under the guise of preventing outbreaks. Covid-19 has similarly affected minority groups in the US disproportionately more than others, and the Trump administration has routinely blame foreigners for spreading the coronavirus and fanned xenophobia.
Like typhus, covid-19 has a knack for exploiting the divisions of the world around it. However, that doesn’t have to be the end of the story. The details may have been different during World War II, but the same principles apply today: A person-borne illness can also be stopped, even in the absence of a miracle cure or vaccine.
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