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A n a i s d o I HM T
virus laboratory located on the campus of the Rockefeller
Institute for Medical Research in NewYork City [28].
4
The Foundation’s experience in Spain also gave it the ability to
act with authority when in November 1942 theAmerican gov-
ernment created the United States Anti-Typhus Commission,
and called on the Foundation for advice. At the first meetings
various public health officials focused on further research on
the epidemiology of typhus, preventing typhus epidemics by
sanitation, and the possibilities of making effective vaccines.
But the Rockefeller representatives argued strongly for an
insecticidal approach.With the approval of the National Re-
search Council and lukewarm approval from the United States
Anti-Typhus Commission, the Foundation established a facil-
ity in NewYork City to test various insecticides.
5
The Foundation’s anti-typhus laboratory, which soon became
known as the “Louse Lab,” quickly established a collaborative
agreement with the United States’ Bureau of Entomology
and Quarantine in the Department of Agriculture whereby
the Bureau would evaluate insecticides, and the Foundation
would test them and other louse-control methods on human
subjects in field conditions. It quickly became apparent that
the Foundation’s thirty years of fieldwork in public health
and its global network of contacts were advantages that a
government agricultural laboratory did not possess. After
successfully establishing a colony of lice in NewYork City,
the Foundation was able carry out tests of insecticides at a
conscientious objector camp in the United States, and at vil-
lages in Mexico, Egypt, and in Algeria – the latter after the
successful Allied invasion of North Africa.
Some of the tested insecticides were good at killing lice, but
none of them were consistently effective. It was only after
a new insecticidal chemical, DDT, became available to the
Foundation in the summer of 1943 that the Foundation’s in-
secticidal strategy was proven to be the right one. Dusting
DDT directly onto human skin became the standard method
of typhus control, and was used against typhus outbreaks
in Naples early in 1944, and in refugee and concentration
camps in the concluding months of the war. It also began
to be used as a method of killing mosquito larvae for ma-
laria control. DDT quickly became the insecticide of choice
throughout the world, in large part because of the global
network of public health specialists fostered by the Rock-
efeller Foundation [28,29,30 ].
Some concluding remarks
Thus, understanding the failure of the anti-typhus project in
Spain provides us with an important preliminary history for
the much better-known global history of theWorld Health
Organization’s and the Pan-American Health Organization’s
DDT-based anti-malaria campaigns of the 1950s. Less ap-
preciated is that the failure of the Rockefeller Foundation’s
typhus project in Spain turned the Foundation and, ultimate-
ly, global public health in a direction that no one in 1941-
1942 could have anticipated.
3 - A valuable study of anti-typhus operations in Eastern Europe in 1941, con-
temporary with the events in this paper, was published by J. Lindemann in 2002.
4 - Much of the remainder of this paper is derived from the publication of the
author in 2005.
5 - Hechemy KE et al. A Century of Rickettsiology,
p
. 2, notes: “Until the disco-
very and availability of chloramphenicol and the tetracyclines in the early 1950s,
Nicolle’s discovery of the vector formed the only basis for measures taken [against
typhus].”
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