14 DDT— Killer of Killers 



from the year 1914 on. The first outbreak occurred in 

 Serbia in November of 1914. It started among the Austrian 

 prisoners whom the Serbians had captured, and soon spread 

 throughout the Serbian Army and the civiHan population. 

 In less than six months over 150,000 people had died, and 

 Serbia was practically helpless. The Austrian Army could 

 easily have gone through Serbia and attacked Turkey, Bul- 

 garia, and Greece before these countries could have put up an 

 eifeaive resistance. But fear of typhus held them back, and 

 the Central Powers lost their initial advantage. 



Typhus flourished among the Eastern armies through- 

 out the war, but vigorous delousing programs kept it pretty 

 well under control among the Germans and Austrians. How- 

 ever, after the retreat of the Russian armies in 1916, typhus 

 cases in Russia began to increase in number, and a full-scale 

 epidemic, like those that had devastated Europe in the Middle 

 Ages, was on its way. The spread of the disease was ac- 

 celerated by the chaotic conditions of civil war; and between 

 the years 1917 and 1921 there were 25,000,000 victims of 

 typhus in the Soviet Republic, and from 2% to 3 million of 

 the viaims died. 



Because World War II passed without a major typhus 

 epidemic, we might be inclined to assume an attitude of com- 

 placency and delude ourselves into believing that "it can't 

 happen here!" That would be unfortunate, for there are 

 dark clouds on the horizon. Typhus is not unknown in this 

 country. Although there have been no epidemics of the 

 classical European type, there have been occasional localized 

 outbreaks of the disease. Since the typhus-infected louse can 

 live for not over 12 days, it seemed highly improbable to 

 students of typhus that these sporadic attacks were due to 

 transmission of the disease from man to man by lice. They 



