Murine Typhus

Murine typhus is the quiet, milder cousin of epidemic typhus. Not transmitted by lice, but by rat fleas — and not at home in the great catastrophes of human history, but at the edges of the everyday world — in port cities, in storehouses, in cellars, in those places where people share a space with animals they would rather know nothing about. The pathogen is called Rickettsia typhi, a tiny bacterium that lives in fleas, which in turn live on rats. An invisible triangle. Until it bites.