Three Hundred Guts Per Hour: the history of vaccine production in wartime Lviv

[muriel_volestrangler]

Ick-factor warning:

One of his lecture subjects was the Weigl typhus vaccine, made by the intrarectal inoculation of lice. Twelve-day-old lice were put in a clamp with their rears in the air. A very fine glass pipette was inserted into the anus and a tiny drop of fluid containing the typhus bacterium, Rickettsia prowazekii, was pumped in. Five days after infection the louse guts started leaking blood. The lice turned red. They were collected into a phenol solution and dissected under a microscope. The intestines were harvested and ground up with more phenol to make the vaccine.

These processes needed people: injectors, who could infect up to two thousand lice per hour; dissectors, who could harvest three hundred guts per hour; and feeders to propagate the lice, kept in cages strapped to their legs, men mostly on their calves and women usually on their thighs. The cages were kept in place by big elastic bands. Next to the skin was a muslin screen through which the lice took their blood meals. Infected lice were fed by people who had previously recovered from typhus.
...
Weigl’s Institute was a place of refuge during the German occupation. Members of the Lwów school of mathematics worked as louse feeders. When stopped by Germans they would say: ‘I hope you have had typhus.’ The Germans would move on hurriedly. Before the war the mathematicians met regularly at Szkocka, the Scottish Café. One of them was Stanisław Ulam, who left for Harvard in 1936, joined the Manhattan Project in 1944, and along with Edward Teller is considered the inventor of the H-bomb.

Weigl was a professor at the University of Lwów Medical School. Ludwik Fleck was briefly his assistant in the early 1920s. In the years before the Second World War, Fleck ran a private diagnostic laboratory in Lwów. When the Germans invaded he was put into the ghetto. There was a typhus epidemic. Fleck developed a vaccine using the sterilised urine of typhus sufferers. He told the Germans it probably wouldn’t work for them because it was made from non-Aryan urine. In February 1943 he was transported to Auschwitz to work in the so-called Hygiene Institute of the SS, and in December he was transferred to its counterpart at Buchenwald, where he superintended the manufacture of vaccines made from the lungs of infected rabbits. Two kinds were made: small amounts of a high quality one for Fleck’s associates, and large amounts of a useless one for the Waffen SS.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2022/march/three-hundred-guts-per-hour

[secondwind]

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