User:Joz27/Hélène Sparrow

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Hélène Sparrow (5 June 1891 - 13 November 1970), was a Polish medical doctor and bacteriologist. She is best known for her work on the control of many epidemics including: Typhoid fever, Cholera, Dysentery, and Smallpox. Throughought the 1920s, Sparrow worked with the Polish Armed Forces at the State Institute of Hygiene in Warsaw. While at the State Institute of Hygiene, she worked vigilantly to produce the first the first vaccine against Typhus and ran several large-scale vaccination campaigns to control the spread of Diphtheria and Scarlet fever all along the eastern frontiers of Poland. In 1933, Sparrow began to study flea-borne and louse-borne Rickettsia diseases in Tunis, where she became the head of her own department at the Pasteur Institute. In her later years, she expanded her studies to include Mexico and Guatemala. While in Mexico and Guatemala, Sparrow developed a protective vaccine against typhus. She contributed a great amount of research to the World Health Organization on relapsing fever specifically in Ethiopia.

Pasteur Institute
In 1923, Hélène Sparrow began her work at the Pasteur Institute located in Tunis, Tunisia. While at the Pasteur Institute, Sparrow met and began working with Charles Nicolle. Sparrow and Nicolle's main studies focused on typhus, specifically the ways in which it spread and how to create a vaccine to limit the contagion. In the beginning of the 20th century, little was known about the typhus epidemic. The only known facts about typhus was that it was a dangerous and deadly disease that spread rapidly amongst dense populations, with its principal factors of contagion being dirty clothing and overcrowding. In September 1909, Nicolle and Sparrow made the discovery that lice were the primary vectors for typhus. This discovery came after observing typhus patients in Tunis. Nicolle stated that patients infected others on the street as well as hospital personnel working with dirty laundry, but once patients were admitted to the hospital and given a hot bath and clean clothing, they ceased to be infectious. This observation led Nicolle and Sparrow to look closer at Louse, as they were suspected to be the culprit for transmitting typhus. For three months, Nicolle and Sparrow tested their lice transmission theory in the lab by injecting an uninfected chimpanzee with blood from a patient infected with typhus and letting lice feed on this now infected host. After a couple of days, the lice were transferred to a healthy chimpanzee to allow them to feed on an uninfected host. It wasn't long until the second chimpanzee contracted typhus, resulting in a positive correlation between lice and the transmission of typhus. The first step in the search for typhus was complete, but there were many challenges ahead as Nicolle and Sparrow were now on the hunt to discover a vaccine.

While searching for the vaccine against typhus, Nicolle and Sparrow encountered many obstacles. Initially, Nicolle and Sparrow mixed typhus bacilli with blood serum from recovered patients. This mixture aided in keeping Nicolle himself in good health, but unfortunately fell short when trying to cure patients who are already infected with typhus. In 1932, Sparrow and Nicolle turned their attention to the Weigl vaccine. Rudolf Weigl developed a technique to aid in the production of a typhus vaccine by producing numerous amounts of infected lice and grinding them to create a vaccine paste. After Nicolle's death in 1936, Sparrow continued her research in the discovery of a typhus vaccine.