How many people died of typhus in WWII?

25,000 deaths
In November 1940, the Nazis walled more than 400,000 Jewish people inside a 3.4-square-kilometre ghetto in Warsaw, Poland. The overcrowded conditions, lack of sewage maintenance and inadequate food and hospital resources meant that typhus rapidly infected about 100,000 people and caused 25,000 deaths.

What was typhus in concentration camps?

Nazi ideology had identified typhus, which is spread by lice, as a disease characteristic of parasitic, subhuman people—the Jews—and the Nazi medical profession was taking outrageous measures ostensibly to combat it.

What does typhus do to the human body?

The rash may cover the entire body except the palms of the hands and the bottoms of the feet. Patients may develop additional symptoms of bleeding into the skin (petechiae), delirium, stupor, hypotension, and shock, which can be life threatening.

Is typhus a pandemic?

Epidemic typhus is spread to people through contact with infected body lice. Though epidemic typhus was responsible for millions of deaths in previous centuries, it is now considered a rare disease.

When did typhus break out in the Jewish ghetto?

As the weather turned cold in late 1941, typhus broke out in the unheated dwellings of the beaten-down Jewish ghetto. A disease that Fleck knew from the First World War now added its monotonous terror to the other threats of annihilation. A dozen or more people were stuffed into each ghetto apartment room.

How did typhus affect people in World War 2?

The disease causes high fever, chills, coughing and severe muscle pain, and it is fatal in about 40% of cases if untreated, the World Health Organization (WHO) says. “Explosive epidemics” of typhus are especially likely to surface when people live in overcrowded conditions with poor hygiene, according to WHO.

When did the typhus epidemic start in Poland?

Records show that a typhus epidemic emerged in the ghetto in the beginning of 1941, but it began dissipating in late October of that year.

How did the typhus epidemic affect the prison population?

Gaol fever often occurs when prisoners are frequently huddled together in dark, filthy rooms. Imprisonment until the next term of court was often equivalent to a death sentence. Typhus was so infectious that prisoners brought before the court sometimes infected the court itself.