THE OTHER IRISH FAMINE - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 105

spread the contagion. If the host falls ill, the louse—highly sensitive to febrile body tem-
perature—will seek out a new host. In prosperous times, where sanitary conditions prevail,
this search will be fruitless. But if the louse is fortunate enough to find itself in a humid
environment among a human community in crisis—housebound families unable to wash or
change their clothes, sharing what coats they have, and huddling together under blankets
for warmth—it will successfully migrate to an alternate body. Its bite is not its death war-
rant; rather, its dry and powdery feces, laden with typhus bacteria, infect the bite wound.
As the bacteria multiply in the bloodstream, massive cellular damage affects the vital or-
gans and gastrointestinal tract. Internal hemorrhages ensue. The victim, confused and fever-
ish throughout an ordeal that may last as long as two weeks, endures painful edematic swell-
ing, organ failure, and ultimately death in at least one in four cases. From there, it is only
a matter of time and statistics. If the weather remains bad and the living conditions of the
human community do not improve, the typhus is essentially unstoppable.
William Carleton recalled the fatal evolution of the 1816 famine into “universal” epidemic
disease the following year in the Clogher Valley:
the gloom that darkened the face of the country had become awful…. Typhus fever had now
set in, and was filling the land with fearful and unexampled desolation. Famine, in all cases
the source and origin of contagion, had done, and was still doing, its work. 22
When typhus struck, the resources of rural Irish communities, already hard-pressed by critical
food shortages, were stretched to the breaking point. The English travel writer John Trotter
paints a pitiful picture of villages, not necessarily remote, that found themselves beyond the
reach of charity or government assistance in 1817, simply abandoned to their fate:
Figure 8.3. The vectors and life cycle of the typhus bacterium rickettsia prowazekii . Note that a person
infected with typhus may carry the disease asymptomatically for years, before triggering a new outbreak
under the stress of deteriorating social conditions. (Yassina Bechah et al., “Epidemic Typhus,” Lancet In-
fectious Diseases 8 [2008]: 420.)
Poor mud cottages were scattered along the road-sides, and we learned, with heartfelt sor-
row, that fever was spreading everywhere among them. When this infectious malady enters
his cottage, the Irish peasant and family are the most wretched of human beings! Unable to