Thanks. I never heard it called “scrub typhus” before.
You wrote “it killed many thousands on the Eastern Front in WWI.” My paternal grandfather fought on the Eastern Front and was a Russian POW before he escaped and walked back to Danzig. Fortunately he never caught it.
They are two different organisms. Scrub typhus is caused by Orientia tsutsugamushi. It’s an Asian thing. But whoops! I was wrong. There is no vaccine for it.
Epidemic typhus (the type that killed soldiers in WWI) is caused by Rickettsia prowazekii. Hmm. No vaccine for it either.
There’s a third type: murine typhus, caused by Rickettsia typhi, spread by fleas. No vaccine for it, either.
I worried about murine typhus once in SE Asia. I lived in a stilt house over the lagoon and was troubled by big wharf rats. They mostly stayed in the attic during daylight, but after dark... Huge rats in your bed is not exactly pleasant. And they do bite. I got rat bite fever :(. It was way worse than the resistant P. falciparum malaria I had before that.
Anyway, someone suggested I get rat poison from Thailand next chance I got. I thought about it, but then I pictured all the wharf rats occupying all the surrounding houses and all the fishing/smuggling boats anchored close by, and pictured them swarming in their thousands to partake of the yummy poisoned bait, expiring in a great heap in my attic, and then zillions of typhus-bearing fleas leaving their cold bodies for my warm one. So I decided to get a baby python instead. Rats run away from python odor.
Maybe you were given typhoid vaccine? I had to get it before going to SE Asia. I dreaded it because the typhoid shot I got as a schoolgirl made me deathly ill. I told the doc about that, so he gave me the oral vaccine and it did not make me sick.
I’m so glad your grandfather did not get typhus, too! My paternal grandfather fought on the Western front in WWI. He was mustard gassed by the Germans, but survived. He never fully recovered, though, and died early when my Dad was just a boy. I wish I could have known him.