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Deportations to the Warsaw ghetto.  Leszno Street near the intersection with Żelazna Street.

Deportations to the Warsaw ghetto. Leszno Street near the intersection with Żelazna Street.
Photo: unknown / Wikimedia Commons (Fair use)

More than 70 years ago, a trapped community in Nazi-occupied Poland regrouped to contain a deadly typhus epidemic, largely without the help of effective vaccines or drugs. Instead, according to new research released today, they likely relied on measures like education, improved sanitation, and even social distancing. Some of the lessons learned from this outbreak could very well apply to our current pandemic, the authors say.

Study author Lewi Stone, a mathematician at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, has been studying past and recent epidemics for more than 30 years, using mathematical models to plot how epidemics spread in a community. Three years ago, he came across tales of a typhus epidemic in the Warsaw ghetto of occupied Poland – the largest of the encampments Nazi Germany established during World War II as a way to separate the local Jewish population and other target groups, with up to 450,000 people living in an area of 1.3 square milesor more than seven people on average per room. But to his knowledge, little work had been done by others to understand what this epidemic really looked like.

“I started to check the historical accounts and was amazed that it was missed. There was a small amount of data, and as I traced it I realized it was extremely important, ”Stone told Gizmodo.

The discoveries of his team, published in Science Advances, gave a lot of surprises.

Epidemic typhus is a bacteria disease notorious for afflicting humanity during times of hardship. It is transmitted by body lice which 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 corpses are scratched into an opening in the skin, infecting the new person. Body lice and typhus are most easily spread in times of war, famine, or other situations where people are crammed into small spaces without worrying about their health (although rare today, some forms of typhus still occasionally cause outbreaks in prisons, for example). Without treatment it is often fatal, killing up to 40% of victims.

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