Typhus

Vaccine for Scrub Typhus Scourge of NG and Far East Can Now be Successfully Treated

IT has now been reveale'd, in London, that a vaccine to combat scrub typhus (Japanese River Fever) was perfected by British scientists last March.

The Ministry of Supply organised large scale production, and many thousands of British troops in the Far East were in oculated, and many others, who already were victims of the disease, were saved by the vaccine.

Scrub typhus which is caused by the Trombicula mite, is prevalent in Japan, Malaya, Netherlands East Indies and New Guinea.

Called Japanese River Fever, it was known in New Guinea from the time the first Europeans penetrated the Morobe district. Few who contracted the disease recovered from it in the early days.

Medical men on the NG mainland made useful investigations, but it was not until large bodies of troops went to the Ter ritories in 1942, that medical science took a real interest in the deadly disease.

The School of Tropical Medicine in Sydney, and the Eliza and Walter Hall Institute in Melbourne,, have both been working on a vaccine, but up until last year, without complete success.

Scrub typhus, if it were not fatal of itself, usually meant many months of ill ness, and often permanent and crippling after-effects.

In the days before the war, the dence of scrub typhus was not hi£h, ocur ring as it did in jungle conditions, but, nonetheless, the discovery of a vaccine will be a godsend to those residents of outport New Guinea to whom the disease was an ever-present possibility.