The Warsaw Ghetto Can Teach The World How To Beat Back An Outbreak

Alex Hershaft remembers the special comb.

He and his family were living in the Warsaw ghetto. It was 1940. He was a little boy, about 6 years old.

A disease known as epidemic typhus was spreading among the close to half a million Jews confined in 1.3 square miles of Warsaw, Poland, in what became known as the Warsaw ghetto.

Records kept by ghetto leaders and unearthed after World War II show six or more people lived in a single room in some apartments. Many homes had no running water, and there were few public baths, according to records from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem.

Typhus is a highly contagious bacterial disease carried by body lice, which thrive in cramped and unsanitary conditions. It can cause fever, chills, body aches, coughs, nausea and confusion. In outbreaks during World War I, the death rate was 10% to 40%. And there was no antibiotic treatment until the drug doxycycline was approved for marketing by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1967.

But the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto beat back typhus. And the comb was