Short answers, pulled from the story.
Typhus is a group of infectious diseases that includes epidemic typhus, scrub typhus, and murine typhus. Epidemic typhus is caused by Rickettsia prowazekii spread by body lice; scrub typhus is caused by Orientia tsutsugamushi spread by chiggers; and murine typhus is caused by Rickettsia typhi spread by fleas.
Typhus is treated with the antibiotic doxycycline. Without treatment, epidemic typhus kills 10% to 60% of infected people, with those over age 50 at the highest risk. In a study of 60 hospitalized patients, no one died when treated with doxycycline or chloramphenicol.
During World War I, over 150,000 people died of typhus in Serbia alone on the Eastern Front. During World War II, typhus epidemics killed thousands in Nazi concentration camps, including Anne Frank, age 15, and her sister Margot, age 19, at Bergen-Belsen.
Epidemic typhus persists in parts of Burundi, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Algeria, and some regions of South and Central America. Murine typhus occurs in tropical and subtropical areas worldwide, including the United States, where an outbreak was identified in Los Angeles County in 2018 and cases reached 171 in 2022.
As of 2025, no vaccine against typhus is commercially available. The first typhus vaccine was developed by Polish zoologist Rudolf Weigl in the interwar period; it reduced mortality but did not prevent infection. A scrub typhus vaccine is currently in development.
The name typhus comes from the Greek word tûphos, meaning hazy or smoky, used to describe delusion, reflecting the mental state the illness produces. Typhus has been described since at least 1528, with the first reliable account appearing in 1489 during the Spanish siege of Baza.