There is a podcast studio called “Either-Or”. They create really good and informative channels (many of them). Currently, I’m listening to the latest episode about typhus and lice on the channel “Why Are We Still Alive”.
Among other things, it discusses how Weigl was manufacturing vaccines for typhus.
We remember that a vaccine is a weakened or killed pathogen, or its fragments, which are introduced into the body of a healthy person, so that their immune system can later cope with the same pathogen, but alive and aggressive. Vaccines are simply grown in laboratories, but the bacteria of typhus did not want to grow in tubes and Petri dishes. Moreover, of all living organisms, they chose only humans and lice, which fed exclusively on humans. Thus, making them infect laboratory animals was almost an impossible task.
What did Rudolf Weigl do? He fed lice. The process looked like this: special small wooden boxes with a mesh bottom, which allowed the louse’s proboscis to pass through but not the louse itself, were tied to a person’s thigh. The boxes were attached several at a time to a leg using elastic bandages. Sitting in these boxes, the insects sucked blood. Afterwards, the box was detached. Then the insects were killed with a five percent acid solution, the spirochetes were extracted from them, washed, and a culture of killed bacteria was obtained to create a vaccine by this method. It took processing 80 to 120 lice per person. The vaccine was needed on an industrial scale, therefore thousands of volunteers were required. Lice were fed by the whole elite of Lviv intelligentsia: there were mathematicians Stefan Banach and Vladislav Orli, geomorphologist Alfred Yan, botanist Serin Geneva, and in the future, the great Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert. All of them were called feeders, meaning providers. Each fed about 25,000 lice a month. The work, of course, was somewhat unpleasant. Despite the increased portions of bread and beetroot jam, the feeders suffered from anemia en masse. But it was definitely better than being shot on the spot or being in a concentration camp.
Besides, Weigl collaborated with the Polish underground. For instance, the poet Zbigniew Herbert was a member of the Polish military organization called the Home Army, which staged sabotages against the Wehrmacht troops. Also, the Home Army helped to smuggle surplus vaccines into the Lviv and Warsaw ghettos. The Germans wanted to exterminate the Jews with typhus, but the epidemic in the ghettos stopped as if by itself.
In 1944, when the Red Army again approached Lemberg, the city became part of the Ukrainian SSR. Weigl left there for Krakow in Poland, where he headed the typhus research institute. He continued to study the disease and teach in Poland, which became a country in the Eastern Bloc, i.e., under the control of the Soviet Union.
It’s also interesting how lice transmit typhus to humans.
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It turns out that the Rickettsia microbe is found in the intestine of the louse, but how does it get into the human? For example, the malarial plasmodium is contained in the saliva of a mosquito and enters the blood during a bite. That makes sense. But how about with lice? The thing is, lice, while feeding on blood, leave excrement. The parasite ends up on the human skin near the bite. The spot itches, and the person begins to scratch it intensively, literally rubbing the infected feces into microabrasions. Rickettsiae penetrate the blood vessel cells and actively multiply there.”
I recommend listening to it; they have already released several seasons of only “Why Are We Still Alive”, and in addition, there are Kolmanovsky’s podcasts and various other things.
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 