Hope of a Vaccine

Jap River Fever

AFTER experiments extending over two years, the School of Tropical Medicine, at the University of Sydney, hopes soon to produce a vac cine to combat scrub typhus (“Japan ese river fever”), the deadliest disease found in New Guinea.

Dr. Harvey Sutton has announced that his staff has had success in’ cultivating the typhus infection, using as a medium the living membrane of new eggs; and numerous vaccine components had been tried, with encouraging success.

Japanese river fever has been known ever since Europeans first penetrated the Morobe district of New Guinea in search of gold. It seemed to be picked up by men who worked in the jungles of the deeper valleys. No one now knows how it got its name—probably because it was treacherous and deadly.

It was regarded as lethal—few men who got it, in the early days of the gold field, ever recovered. Some of the medi cal men who were stationed in Wau made useful investigations, suspected that the disease followed a tick infection, and evolved a treatment which somewhat reduced the death-rate.

Nonetheless, when the troops went to New Guinea, scrub tvphus still was a mysterious and deadly disease. Since then, many soldiers have been attacked with it; some have died, and some have been very badly crippled. A girl pathologist, assisting an investigation in Melbourne recently, accidentally pricked her finger and was infected with the typhus, and died.

The discovery of a vaccine will be a triumph for the School of Tropical Medi cine. and a godsend for the mainland of New Guinea.

“Bush Typhus”

The following note is from a New Guinea resident :— IN the early thirties, a Morobe doctor succeeded in isolating the cause of the disease: the microscopic bush tick that attacks every one in the New Guinea bush, to a small or large degree, and causes the intensely irritating bush itch. These “bush mokas” (as they are called) cause, in the great majority of cases, no more than this irritating rash; it is believed that it is when the tick has previously lived on a diseased animal (such as a rat), and then attacks a human being “bush typhus” (or Japanese river fever) results.

Cases occur all over the jungle-covered portions of the Mainland, and the disease has a high mortality rate. The first few cases treated in the Wau hospital- were regarded as completely mysterious, and were fatal Then a patient recovered, more -by sheer luck than anything else, and from his blood a serum was made which, injected into subsequent sufferers, effectively reduced the death rate. Even so. it is a virulent affair, the complete answer to which would no doubt be a vaccine to “proof” jungle residents effec tively from the disease.