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South African Typhus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 May 2009

Adrianus Pijper  and
Helen Dau
Adrianus Pijper
Affiliation:
From the Authors' private laboratory, Pretoria, South Africa
Helen Dau
Affiliation:
From the Authors' private laboratory, Pretoria, South Africa
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From an outbreak of very mild “typhus-like disease” in Pretoria, which strongly resembled the cases of “sporadic” or “mild” typhus occasionally occurring in that town, a virus was isolated which was studied in guinea-pigs and rabbits, and was found to belong to the typhus-group.

This virus in cross-immunity experiments with virus of South African louse-typhus and South African tick-bite fever and also in other respects behaved exactly like the typhus-like virus the authors on a previous occasion isolated from rats in a South African town where cases of “mild” or “ sporadic ” typhus have been known to occur regularly for many years.

This constitutes evidence that South African “mild” or “sporadic” typhus comes from rats and is communicated to man by rat-fleas.

In southern Africa, therefore, one has to reckon with three typhus-like diseases: tick-bite fever, flea-typhus from rats, and louse-typhus. Tick-bite fever has a primary sore, the tick-bite, as a pathognomic symptom, the other two can only be differentiated satisfactorily from one another by cross-immunity tests.

Agglutination reactions and cross-immunity tests show that South African louse-typhus and South African rat- or flea-typhus are not identical with similar diseases in other parts of the world.

Tick-bite fever is a mild typhus-like disease extending from the Cape to South Rhodesia.

The typhus-like disease of Kenya is not tick-bite fever, and seems to be identical with fièvre boutonneuse.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Hygiene , Volume 35 , Issue 1 , February 1935 , pp. 116 - 124
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1935

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