science · 04 September 1940 · 84 years ago
death
Died 4 Sep 1940 at age 61 (born 17 Nov 1878).
American bacteriologist and immunologist who was an international authority on typhus, the deadly disease for which he isolated the typhus germ (1936). By 1939 he had perfected a method to produce enough anti-typhus vaccine to protect a nation. He travelled abroad to study disease outbreaks: an typhus epidemic in Serbia (1915), cholera in the Soviet Union (1923), a prison typhus epidemic in Mexico (1931) and lectured in China (1938). He published over 160 scientific papers. The cause of typhus is Rickettsia organisms carried by a louse or a rat flea and transmitted to humans by a bite from the parasites, especially in areas of poor sanitation and overcrowding. He wrote his autobiography in the third person, As I Remember Him, while dying of leukemia.
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