Abstract
ACCORDING to an editorial in the March issue of the Boletin de la Oflcina Sanitaria Panamericana the Panamerican Committee on Typhus and other Rickettsial Diseases set up by the eleventh Panamerican Congress held in Bio de Janeiro in September 1942 has come to the following conclusions. With improvement in the methods of investigation the number of cases and the extent of the geographical areas are becoming more apparent. In Chile and more recently in Bolivia and Columbia there have been several epidemics of typhus. Sporadic cases or small epidemics have been repeatedly notified in the Argentine, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador and Venezuela, while in Central America serious outbreaks have been reported in Guatemala as well as cases in El Salvador, Honduras and most of the Caribbean Islands such as Cuba, Puerto Rico and Jamaica. These diseases form one of the major health problems in some parts of Mexico and the United States, and cases have also been seen in Canada. The rickettsiases found in America may be classified into the following four groups: (1) epidemic, classic, European or louse-borne ; (2) endemic, murine or flea-borne ; (3) Rocky Mountain spotted fever ; and (4) Q fever or nine mile fever, Japanese river fever or tsutsugamushi apparently not found hitherto on the American continent. The problem is particularly serious at the present time owing to the War, the rapid transportation of large numbers of persons to and from infected zones and the difficulty of enforcing maritime and aerial quarantine.
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Distribution of Typhus. Nature 152, 382 (1943). https://doi.org/10.1038/152382a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/152382a0