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A Bacterium Saved a Town During World War II

© Neal Rolfe Chamberlain

Our bodies do not like foreign invaders. When a bacterium or virus invades, we make antibodies that will help our bodies to eliminate these invaders. Antibodies are proteins our immune system makes that bind to antigens (antigens=foreign substances not found in our bodies) made by bacteria or viruses.

Sometimes one bacterium can have an antigen that is very similar to an antigen from another bacterium. It has been known for a long time that a bacterium called Proteus OX19 has antigens that cause our bodies to make antibodies that will not only react with Proteus OX19 antigens but also with a bacterium called Rickettsia prowazekii. Proteus OX19 does not cause a lot of disease; however, Rickettsia prowazekii causes a disease called typhus. Typhus is a disease that causes people to have a very high, prolonged fever and rash. This disease spreads very rapidly and is oftentimes fatal. In fact, during World War I typhus killed more people than did bullets.

Past memories of this dreadful typhus resulted in the Nazis' being afraid to enter towns that had large numbers of people with typhus during World War II. Two Polish physicians, Dr. Eugeniusz Lazowski and Dr. Stanislav Matulewicz, from a small town in Poland called Rozvadow (124 miles (200 km) from Warsaw), knew of the Nazis' fear of typhus. They also knew that Proteus OX19 would give people of their town antibodies that reacted with the typhus bacteria in laboratory tests. So, in order to keep the Nazis out of their town, these ingenious physicians started injecting the people of Rozvadow with dead Proteus OX19. When blood samples from these individuals were sent for testing, they turned up "positive" for antibodies indicating typhus infection. As more and more tests came back "positive," German officials became convinced that a typhus epidemic was raging in this corner of Poland.

The Nazis relied heavily on the lab results and were either too lax or too fearful to actually go and look at all the people with antibodies to typhus/Proteus OX19. As a result, the people of this particular Polish town were not conscripted into forced labor and the Nazis avoided the vicinity. Two physicians armed with Proteus 0X19 fooled the Nazis and saved hundreds of their citizens' lives.

Sometimes that microbial trivia can save lives! Maybe I will tell my medical students that story this year. By the way, this story was drawn from Power Unseen: How Microbes Rule the World, a book of microbial vignettes by Bernard Dixon. More of these very interesting microbial stories can be read at MicrobeWorld's: