Medicine: Typhus in Naples

There was an epidemic of typhus in Naples last week—not the mild kind that lurks in some U.S. rats and mice, but the European epidemic typhus that kills 20 out of 100 victims and held up the Austrian attack on Serbia in World War I.

Though U.S. troops are protected by vaccine and anti-louse powder, the Allied Military Government declared Naples “off limits” for troops, settled down to trying to fight the scourge which has hit 250 people in the gutted town. In charge of the Naples district for AMG: Colonel Edgar Erskine Hume (TIME, May 10), who fought typhus in Serbia after World War I.