Venomous vermin

Abstract

Abstract The story of typhus has been told by Ludwik Gross, the man who—against the unquestioned wisdom of the time (which rejected any notion of a link between viruses and cancers)—discovered the first leukaemia virus. He carried out this research in such time as he could spare from his duties as a busy hospital doctor in New York. As a young man, Gross worked at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and there in 1934 had met Charles Nicolle, recipient of the Nobel Prize in 1928 for his discovery that typhus was carried by lice (as had been conjectured for some time). Nicolle headed the Pasteur Institute of Tunis during the first decade of the twentieth century, and there, during a typhus epidemic, he was struck by a curious circumstance: the townspeople were going down with the disease in their homes and in the streets, but no one ever became infected in a hospital, seething with typhus victims. Patients were, of course, washed and clad in hospital garb, and Nicolle deduced that infection lurked in dirty clothing and probably, therefore, in lice. He injected a monkey with the blood of a typhus patient and, when the animal tell sick, collected lice from its body and applied them to another monkey, which also then developed typhus. Nicolle further showed that the lice that harboured the infective agent, clearly a bacterium, turned red and died.