Typhus: Infectious Disease and South America
Pandemics are disease that spread over a country or the world. Typhus is an example of a pandemic. Typhus is a bacterial disease that is spread by lice and fleas. Brill Zinsser is the discoverer of the disease and typhus is also known as “Brill Zinsser Disease”. Two types of most common typhus are endemic and murine. Endemic typhus is usually seen in places with cold temperature, endemic typhus are sometimes called “jail fever” or “camp fever” because typhus killed hundreds of thousands of people of prisoners in the Nazi concentration camp in World War II.
The other type of typhus is murine. Murine typhus is mostly seen during summer or fall. It mostly occurs in southern part of U. S and areas around the equator because the temperature is hot. Typhus is first recorded typhus epidemic was the Plague of Athens in 420 B. C. This epidemic killed a lot of people because so many people were infected. It had killed thousands of people during the Plague of Athens because of typhus. It was spreading throughout places because of the infected rat and mice. It was later spread to South America afterward.
Some of the symptoms of typhus are backache, headache, muscle pain, and it also causes a red rash at the center of the chest few hours after infection. It also causes low blood pressure. There are also ways to prevent getting typhus. One way is to avoid areas with fleas and lice, another way is to just be clean, and use insecticide to kill lice. If people really have lice, they can boil their clothes for around 5 days to kill lice. There are few antibiotics treatments for typhus, doxycycline, tetracycline, and Chloramphenicol, which is the less common.
Typhus had impacted society in many ways. It had changed many things in the society. Typhus had killed a lot of people throughout the history. It also led to many development of medicine. The medicines are still used in the society today to cure other disease. Since typhus mostly occur in places that have poor hygiene and dirty areas, now people aware more about their cleanness. This makes people keep their houses, areas clean so they can prevent typhus from affecting them.
