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A feeder of lice was a job in interwar and Nazi-occupied Poland, in the city of Lwów at the ''Institute for Study of Typhus and Virology'' of Rudolf Weigl ((ポーランド語:Instytut Badań nad Tyfusem Plamistym i Wirusami prof. Rudolfa Weigla)) in Lwów (Lviv, Ukraine). It involved serving as a source of blood for lice, a typhus vector, which could then be used to develop vaccines against the disease. Initially begun in 1920 by Weigl, during the Nazi occupation of the city it became the primary means of support and protection for many of the city's Polish intellectuals, including the mathematician Stefan Banach and the poet Zbigniew Herbert. While the profession carried a significant risk of infection, thanks to Weigl's patronage the feeders of lice obtained additional food rations, were protected from being shipped to slave labor in Germany or German concentration camps, and were allowed additional mobility around the occupied city. Typhus research involving human subjects, who were purposely infected with the disease, was also carried out in various Nazi concentration camps, in particular at Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen and to a lesser extent at Auschwitz. ==Background== French bacteriologist Charles Nicolle showed in 1909 that lice (''Pediculus humanus corporis'') were the primary means by which the typhus bacteria (''Rickettsia prowazekii'') were spread.〔 In his experiments Nicolle infected a chimpanzee with typhus, retrieved the lice from it, and placed them on a healthy chimpanzee who developed the disease shortly thereafter.〔 Further work established that it was lice excrement rather than bites which spread the disease.〔 Nicolle received a Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for his work on typhus in 1928.〔 During World War I, beginning in 1914, Rudolf Weigl, a Polish parasitologist of Austrian background was drafted into the Austrian army and given the task of studying typhus and its causes.〔〔 Weigl worked at a military hospital in Przemyśl, where he supervised the newly established Laboratory for the Study of Spotted Typhus.〔 After Poland regained its independence Weigl was hired, in 1920, as a Professor of Biology in the Medical Faculty at the Jan Kazimierz University in Lwów, at the ''Institute for Study of Typhus and Virology''.〔 While there, he developed a vaccine against typhus made from grown lice which were then crushed into a paste. Initially the lice were grown on the blood of guinea pigs but the effectiveness of the vaccine depended on the blood being as similar to human blood as possible. As a consequence, by 1933, Weigl began using human volunteers as feeders. While the volunteers fed healthy lice, there was still the danger of accidental exposure to some of the typhus-carrying lice in the institute. Additionally, once the lice were infected with typhus, they required additional feeding, which carried the risk of the human feeder becoming infected with the disease. Weigl protected the donors by vaccinating them beforehand, and although some of them (including Weigl himself) developed the disease, none died. However, the production of the vaccine was still a potentially dangerous activity, and it was still difficult to produce the vaccine on a large scale.〔〔 At the time Weigl's vaccine was the only one in existence which could be employed in practical applications outside of controlled settings. The first widespread use of his vaccine was carried out in China by Belgian missionaries between 1936 and 1943.〔〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Feeder of lice」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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