Rickettsiales and rickettsial diseases in Australia - Murdoch ...

that did not look consistent with typhoid. Weil-Felix test results showed
agglutination with the OX19 strain, which was consistent with a rickettsial
infection (not scrub typhus). This was the first report of R. typhi (the agent of
murine typhus) infection in Australia 108 . A year later, Hone reported 21 more
cases of disease ‘closely resembling typhus fever’. He noted that unlike the
previous cases that had occurred around Port Adelaide, a number of these new
cases occurred throughout Adelaide and its suburbs. He also noted that the
cases were distributed evenly throughout the year with a slightly higher
prevalence in Autumn 109 .
In 1926, Wheatland described thirty eight cases as ‘(resembling) very closely’
the symptoms reported by Hone in Adelaide, with fever, headache and a
macular rash of the body and limbs, although with only a 3% mortality rate 279 .
Locals referred to the disease as ‘mouse fever’ as it usually occurred during
mouse plagues, where thousands of mice would swarm on farms in the area 279 .
Wheatland concluded that the disease was likely the same as Hone had
described in Adelaide, that it was not contagious and that it was most likely
transmitted by an ‘ecto-parasite associated with (mice)’ 279 .
In 1927, Hone published an update on murine typhus in Adelaide, reporting an
additional 85 cases with ‘scarcely a month (passing) without one or more of
these cases being under observation somewhere in or about Adelaide’ 110 . He
also confirmed Wheatland’s assumptions that the disease was associated with
rats or mice or their arthropod vectors (primarily rat fleas), although he
suspected infection by inhalation rather than a bite, noting that the ‘disturbance
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