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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.



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