User:Rdh9hn/sandbox


 * Is everything in the article relevant to the article topic? Is there anything that distracted you?

All of the information in the article seems relevant to the topic and does not have any distracting information.


 * Is the article neutral? Are there any claims, or frames, that appear heavily biased toward a particular position?

The article appears very neutral and does not make any claims that would be viewed as biased towards any particular person or group of people.


 * Are there viewpoints that are overrepresented, or underrepresented?

The History section of the article is very thorough and provides a history of the disease dating back to before the disease was truly recognized as typhus. The article speculates on many outbreaks that could have been typhus but does not provide strong evidence for them being an early form of typhus. Also, the diagnosis section is barely existent and does not provide any helpful information as to how a person is diagnosed with typhus.

[You didn't answer all these questions, or even enough to show you understand what a content gap is.]
 * Check a few citations. Do the links work? Does the source support the claims in the article?
 * Is each fact referenced with an appropriate, reliable reference? Where does the information come from? Are these neutral sources? If biased, is that bias noted?
 * Is any information out of date? Is anything missing that could be added?
 * Check out the Talk page of the article. What kinds of conversations, if any, are going on behind the scenes about how to represent this topic?
 * How is the article rated? Is it a part of any WikiProjects?
 * How does the way Wikipedia discusses this topic differ from the way we've talked about it in class?

Sources:
Epidemiological State-Building in Interwar Poland: Discourses and Paper Technologies (2019) Science in Context Volume 32 Issue 1 March 2019

Enlightened Immunity: Mexico's Experiments with Disease Prevention in the Age of Reason (2018) Bulletin of the history of medicine Volume 93 Issue 3

Typhus Vaccine Developments from the First to the Second World War (On Paul Weindling's `Between Bacteriology and Virology...') (2002) History and philosophy of life sciences Volume 24 Issue 3/4

Excerpt from article to edit

History of Vaccines and Prevention
Major developments for typhus vaccines started during World War I where typhus had become a serious problem for soldiers on the battlefield. Vaccines for typhus, like other vaccines of the time, were classified as either living or killed vaccines. Live vaccines were typically an injection of live agent, and killed vaccines are live cultures of an agent that are chemically inactivated prior to use.

Attempts to create a living vaccine of classical, louse born, typhus were attempted by French researches but proved unsuccessful. This led researches to turn away from classical typhus and to murine typhus to develop a live vaccine. At the time, murine vaccine was viewed as a less severe alternative to classical typhus, and four versions of a live vaccine cultivated from murine typhus were tested, on a large scale, in 1934.

While the French were making advancements with live vaccines, other European countries were working to develop killed vaccines. During the second world war, there were three kinds of potentially useful killed vaccines. All three killed vaccines relied on the cultivation of R. prowazekii, the organism responsible for typhus. The first attempt at a killed vaccine was developed by Germany using the R. prowazekii found in louse feces. The vaccine was tested extensively in Poland between the two world wars and used by the Germans during their attacks on the Soviet Union. A second method of growing R. prowazekii was discovered using the yolk sac of chick embryos. Germans tried several times to use this technique of growing R. prowazekii but none were pushed very far. The last technique was an extended development of the previously known method of growing murine typhus in rodents. It was discovered that rabbits could be infected, by a similar process, and contract classical typhus instead of murine typhus. Again, while proven to produce suitable R. prowazekii for vaccine development, this method was not used to produce wartime vaccines.

During the second world war the two major vaccines were the killed vaccine grown in louse and the live vaccine from France. Both vaccines were of little use during the war. The killed, louse grown vaccine was difficult to manufacture in large enough quantities, and the French vaccine was believed to not be safe enough for use. This led the Germans to work on the development of their own live vaccine from the urine of typhus victims. While developing a live vaccine, Germany used live R. prowazekii to test multiple possible vaccine's capabilities. Concentration camp prisoners were also given live R. prowazekii and used as a control group for the vaccine tests. The use of DDT as an effective means of killing louse, the main carrier of typhus, was also discovered in Naples.

Overview and Signs and Symptoms paragraph
October 2020 additions:

Overview:

Typhus fever is caused by the bacteria Salmonella typhi. Typhus is rare in industrialized countries, and occurs primarily in the colder, mountainous regions of central and east Africa, as well as Central and South America. Through history, typhus has spread the most after wars and natural disasters. It is typically spread through contaminated water and food, or with close contact with an individual affected with typhus. Vaccines and antibacterial treatments are available, and are generally successful at curing affected individuals.

Signs and Symptoms:

Symptoms of typhus typically take some time to first appear. The average time for an individual to develop symptoms after initial contact is anywhere from 1 to 3 weeks. Symptoms that develop early on can vary, and these symptoms worsen if the individual does not seek treatment.

Early Symptoms:


 * Fever (typically starting as a low-grade, but increasing with each day)
 * Headache
 * Weakness and Fatigue
 * Body aches
 * Sweating
 * Loss of appetite and weight loss
 * Dry cough
 * Abdominal pain (typically with abdominal swelling)
 * Diarrhea or Constipation
 * Rash (begins on chest approximately 5 days after symptoms appear, spreads throughout as the disease persists)
 * Hypotension (low blood pressure)
 * Sensitivity to Light

If treatment is received, these symptoms can be relieved within a week. There are some cases where symptoms persist after the fever is gone or even comeback after they have already went away once, but this does not always happen. However, if treatment is not received, these symptoms can worsen, and new symptoms can develop.

Later Symptoms that develop if treatment is not received.


 * Deliriousness
 * "Typhoid State", which is where the affected individual is motionless and extremely exhausted, with the eyes remaining partially open
 * Death, or development of Life Threatening complications

Peer Review by K8shep (talk) 20:45, 23 October 2020 (UTC)
1. What does the article do well? Is there anything from your review that impressed you? Any turn of phrase that described the subject in a clear way? Your drafts are each different here. There is a lot of detail in the first large paragraph, which looks like it will be very useful in organizing the article once it is moved to the main space. The Symptoms section is much better organized here than in the original article.

2. What changes would you suggest the author apply to the article? Why would those changes be an improvement? Make sure you reorganize that large paragraph--it's a bit unwieldy in a wikipedia article--how could you split it into a few smaller paragraphs? Make sure you're clear here, too, on what you're adding. It's hard to tell. With the symptoms, you'll want to make sure you also include a lot of the important information that is in the original article. Don't miss out on that.

3. What's the most important thing the author could do to improve the article? You need to make sure to make this readable-small paragraphs, not a wall of text. Also, make sure to proofread! For the sentence that talks about developed/developing countries, is there a way to say this that is more geographical than focusing on levels of development? It's hard to define countries like that anymore.

Response to Peer Review
As the author of the large paragraph, I can see why the information should be split up into smaller sections. When writing, I was unsure of how I wanted to structure my additions and, also, did not know exactly how much information I was going to add. Now, with a large majority of the information written out I will be able to better structure my material. I think that with some restructuring of my information and some small edits to the existing article, it will be clear what I am trying to portray. I did not include the entire section that would include small changes just to save myself the headache, but the hope is to split the history section into two smaller subsections. The first subsection will mainly be what is already covered in the article, the history of outbreaks across the world. The second subsection that I will be adding will be the history of vaccines and their development. And, of course, a thorough proofread of the entire history section will be made prior to posting. Rdh9hn (talk) 16:45, 30 October 2020 (UTC)

Response to Peer Review -- Dylan Dunbar
1) I focused on the signs and symptoms portion because I believed it could be added to and organized. I agree that I was able to do that, but I could also add some small details about the symptoms also for further information and clarity

2) I agree that I do need to add information that is in the original article. I wanted to focus on remapping the framework of this section make it easier to read and comprehend, but I forgot to add some necessary info. I will make sure to do that,

3) After looking back at the overview paragraph, I agree that I can adjust the location of the prominence of Typhoid fever to geological locations rather than saying third-world/developing countries. Not only would it be a better descriptor, but also these countries are located worldwide and typhoid isn't necessarily in every one of them.