How Typhus Gets Transmittes
Creative people have a knack of noticing exceptions, even if they look inconsequential and trivial. The discovery of mechanisms by which the typhus virus gets transmitted from person to person could be made only because Dr Charles Nicholle focused on one such unobtrusive detail.
Nicholle was in Tunis when there was an outbreak of typhus in the city. The disease spread rapidly, since the infection got transmitted from person to person. It was also difficult to contain it, since no one knew how people passed on the infection. However, one fact which puzzled Dr Nicholle was that for some unknown reasons, once typhus victims a got admitted to the hospital, they stopped infecting others.
One day as he entered the hospital, he saw one person with typhus lying prostrate near the doorway. As he bent over the victim, the answer to the problem - i.e., why hospital patients do not pass on their infection to others - came to him as a sudden insight. He realised that patients' hair were shaved off when they were admitted to the hospital. If this is what deprived them of their capacity to transmit typhus, then apparently, the infection must be spreading through lice. Nicholle felt absolutely convinced that he had found the solution, and went on to prove his insight by experimenting on monkeys.
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