Warsaw, 1940. In the largest Jewish ghetto in Europe created by Nazi Germany, hunger and cold are raging. 450,000 Jews, or about 40% of the city’s population, live in unsanitary conditions. They were placed by the German authorities on an area of about 8% of the area of Warsaw, around which a perimeter wall was built. Undernutrition, Nazi terror, tuberculosis, the population suffers from appalling living conditions. To this is added typhus, at the time an endemic disease in Eastern Europe. Transmitted by lice and fleas, it causes a high fever as well as skin rashes. During the Second World War, between 30 and 40 million people are infected in Russia. Between 3 and 5 million will die from it. The epidemic is also spreading to concentration camps, where hundreds of thousands of prisoners will die of this disease, including Anne Franck. But at the time, in Warsaw, the population organized despite everything and managed to stem the typhus, according to a recent study published in the specialist journal Science.
The fear of the transmission of typhus, a pretext for a genocide
« Fear of typhus transmission in Germany during WWII was used as a pretext by the Nazis to isolate the Jewish population in ghettos and commit genocide“, Explain the authors of the study. In the Jewish ghetto of Warsaw, crowded and suffering from the lack of food, soap andwater, the disease is then easily spread via the lice. But immense efforts will be made to try to stop the disease, starting with sensitizing and informing prisoners about this pathology. ” Health education and hygiene have become major subjects. Many hygiene courses have been initiated, dealing with public hygiene but also infectious diseases. More than 900 people sometimes took part in these courses. Hundreds of lectures public events were held about typhus. An underground university was set up to train young medical students. And scientific studies on famine and epidemics have been launched. At the same time, the hygiene of daily life has been particularly strengthened. ” The cleanliness of buildings and dwellings was encouraged, and often even enforced. Social distancing was considered basic common sense by all, although it was not forced. Home isolation has been put in place. »All these measures helped prevent transmission of the disease to more than 100,000 ghetto residents, preventing thousands of typhus deaths, the authors write. « It turns out that the Warsaw ghetto had a lot of doctors, with even a scientist nominated for the Nobel Prize, Prof. Ludwik Hirszfeld, who discovered the transmission of blood groups. Some of these doctors survived and were able to testify about their experience there.«
A sudden drop just when the typhus epidemic should have accelerated instead
With his team, Dr Lewi Stone, professor of biomathematics at Tel Aviv University (Israel), used mathematical modeling to find out if typhus has ” extinguished by itself Naturally or if these measures actually contributed to its disappearance. However, it was impossible to work with the raw data that remained from that time about typhus. ” It was particularly complicated to work on this subject, already for the simple reason that the prisoners of the ghetto did not like to declare their illness because it could lead to punitive actions on behalf of the authorities. For example, I learned during my research that hospitals were set on fire by the Nazis, with patients still inside, simply because the presence of typhus had been observed in the establishment. Phenol injections were even injected directly into the hearts of sick people in order to kill them.. »
The research team therefore looked at R0, the rate of transmission of the disease through the population, and observed a sharp drop in this indicator in the fall. ” I was very surprised to see this sudden drop right at the time when the typhus epidemic should rather have accelerated. We know that in other parts of the world, typhus persisted throughout the winter without stopping. A sign for the research team that the intervention of the prison community has indeed contributed to stem the epidemic in the Warsaw ghetto. ” Added to this, our mathematical model showed that without these measurements, the epidemic would have been two to three times larger with a peak in the middle of winter.. ” The figures officials on typhus-related deaths did not match non more to the diaries kept at the time and literature already existing science on the subject. Thanks to their mathematical model, bio– computer scientists managed to estimate the real number of typhus cases at the time: in July 1942, 100,000 people died from typhus combined with starvation. ” I was also surprised at the actual number of typhus cases that our model told us. Official reports showed figures much lower. But checking the reports of epidemiologists from the ghetto, we found that our model was quite correct, with around 100,000 infections.. »
A lesson for the Covid-19?
With the emergence of the Covid-19 crisis at the beginning of 2020, all eyes are turning more and more on the previous epidemics that have marked theHistory, like the Black Death in Europe in the 14th century or even the Spanish flu of 1918. So what can we learn from the typhus epidemic in the Warsaw Ghetto? ” Typhus is a bacterium and is transmitted via fleas. This is a disease whose characteristics are quite different from Covid-19. The latter is more contagious while typhus is more deadly. It is not known if the typhus efforts would have worked against the Covid-19“, Explains the researcher, who rather underlines the tenacity and the merit of the prisoners of the ghetto. ” Eventually, the prolonged and determined efforts of doctors as well as the working community paid off. If the two diseases are too different to be compared, history will remember that the continuous efforts despite the catastrophic situation made it possible to contain the disease.
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Warsaw, 1940. In the largest Jewish ghetto in Europe created by Nazi Germany, hunger and cold are raging. 450,000 Jews, or about 40% of the city’s population, live in unsanitary conditions. They were placed by the German authorities on an area of about 8% of the area of Warsaw, around which a perimeter wall was built. Undernutrition, Nazi terror, tuberculosis, the population suffers from appalling living conditions. To this is added typhus, at the time an endemic disease in Eastern Europe. Transmitted by lice and fleas, it causes a high fever as well as skin rashes. During the Second World War, between 30 and 40 million people are infected in Russia. Between 3 and 5 million will die from it. The epidemic is also spreading to concentration camps, where hundreds of thousands of prisoners will die of this disease, including Anne Franck. But at the time, in Warsaw, the population organized despite everything and managed to stem the typhus, according to a recent study published in the specialist journal Science.
The fear of the transmission of typhus, a pretext for a genocide
« Fear of typhus transmission in Germany during WWII was used as a pretext by the Nazis to isolate the Jewish population in ghettos and commit genocide“, Explain the authors of the study. In the Jewish ghetto of Warsaw, crowded and suffering from the lack of food, soap andwater, the disease is then easily spread via the lice. But immense efforts will be made to try to stop the disease, starting with sensitizing and informing prisoners about this pathology. ” Health education and hygiene have become major subjects. Many hygiene courses have been initiated, dealing with public hygiene but also infectious diseases. More than 900 people sometimes took part in these courses. Hundreds of lectures public events were held about typhus. An underground university was set up to train young medical students. And scientific studies on famine and epidemics have been launched. At the same time, the hygiene of daily life has been particularly strengthened. ” The cleanliness of buildings and dwellings was encouraged, and often even enforced. Social distancing was considered basic common sense by all, although it was not forced. Home isolation has been put in place. »All these measures helped prevent transmission of the disease to more than 100,000 ghetto residents, preventing thousands of typhus deaths, the authors write. « It turns out that the Warsaw ghetto had a lot of doctors, with even a scientist nominated for the Nobel Prize, Prof. Ludwik Hirszfeld, who discovered the transmission of blood groups. Some of these doctors survived and were able to testify about their experience there.«
A sudden drop just when the typhus epidemic should have accelerated instead
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