TYPHUS FEVER, (Filth Disease)
Categories:
Infectious Diseases
Typhus fever is an acute, infectious
disease, characterized by a sudden onset, marked nervous symptoms, and
spotted rash and fever ending quickly after two weeks. Also called jail,
camp, hospital, or ship fever. Filth has a great deal to do with its
production. There is no real characteristic symptom except the eruption.
Symptoms. It generally lasts two weeks. Incubation period of twelve days
or less, marked at
imes by slight weary feeling. The onset is usually
sudden, by one chill or several, with high fever, headache, pain in back
and legs, prostration, vomiting, and mild and active delirium. Pulse does
not have the double beat, often there is bronchitis.
Eruption. "This appears on the third to fifth day; the fever remaining
high. During the second week all the symptoms increase and are weakening
with marked delirium and coma vigil" (unconscious, delirious, but with the
eyes open). When death occurs it usually comes at the end of the second
week from exhaustion. Favorable cases terminate at this time by crisis;
the prostration is extreme; but convalescence is rapid.
Fever. Sudden onset to even 104 to 105 degrees; steady rise for four or
five days with slight morning remissions; terminating by crisis on the
twelfth to fourteenth day, falling in some cases below normal; in fatal
cases there is a rapid rise to 108 or 109 degrees. The eruption appears on
the abdomen on the third to fifth day.
Treatment like Typhoid. Mortality, twelve to twenty per cent.