Typhus fever is now rare in America, but there was an outbreak in New York City in 1881. This was the fever that killed multitudes of Irish emigrants about the middle of the nineteenth century. It is called also spotted fever, camp, jail, ship, and hospital fever, and it has many other names. The name typhus is from
, a smoke or fog, and it indicates the befogged, stuporous condition of the patient. Typhoid fever is so called because it has some resemblance to typhus.
The specific cause of typhus is unknown, but the contagion develops and reproduces itself in the body of the patient. It is thought that the contagion exists in the secretions and excretions of the body and in the exhalations from the lungs and skin. The infection can certainly be carried by clothing, dust, furniture, conveyances of all kinds, and dead bodies, and it remains active for months. It may be transmitted through the air for short distances, not nearly so far as the air will carry the contagion of smallpox. In well-ventilated rooms there is less danger of infection, and a typhus patient should have at least 1,500 cubic feet of air space. The contagion may be transmitted in all stages of the disease and during convalescence.
Physical weakness, anxiety and worry, improper food, and poverty, are disposing conditions for infection by typhus. The mortality is about 10 per centum—much less than that of smallpox.
In giving the last Sacraments to a typhus patient exactly the same method should be followed as that observed for a smallpox patient. Keep as far from the patient as possible. After you touch him in anointing or in giving other Sacraments step away from him to say the necessary words. Do not stand between him and an open fireplace, window, door, or ventilator.
Relapsing fever, or famine fever, caused by Obermeier's [{180}] spirillum, is sometimes associated with typhus. It has a mortality that can go up to 14 per centum in unfavourable circumstances, but the disease is not more contagious than typhoid under hygienic surroundings. Wash the hands in bichloride solution after visiting a case, and do not touch the door-knob or things in the room.
Rabies (called also hydrophobia in man) is a rare disease. It is communicable by inoculation, but it is very doubtful that the disease has been communicated from man to man. The saliva from a person suffering with rabies if injected into a warm-blooded animal will cause rabies, and on that account it is prudent to use care in touching such a patient in administering the last Sacraments. The virus might enter through an abrasion on the priest's hand.
There is a false hydrophobia observed in excitable persons that have been bitten by a dog thought to be mad. The dog that has genuine rabies grows sullen, it hides in comers, and it snaps at everything presented to it A sticky, frothy mucus drivels from its mouth and its eyes become red. It will run straight ahead, snapping at anything it meets; it swallows small stones, chips, and similar objects; it does not avoid water. It howls, grows lean, and its hind legs and lower jaw become paralysed.
In man there is a premonitory stage; a furious stage, which lasts from about a day to three days; then a final paralytic stage. It is well to wait for the paralytic stage before anointing the patient, because in the other stages the slightest touch causes violent spasms. Confessors should note that the virus of rabies excites the sexual centres.