The same risk applies to refugees, who travel across country lines, often living in close proximity and unable to maintain necessary hygienic standards to avoid being at risk for catching lice possibly infected with typhus.Because the typhus-infected lice live in clothing, the prevalence of typhus is also affected by weather, humidity, poverty and lack of hygiene. Lice, and therefore typhus, are more prevalent during colder months, especially winter and early spring. In these seasons, people tend to wear multiple layers of clothing, giving lice more places to go unnoticed by their hosts. This is particularly a problem for poverty-stricken populations as they often do not have multiple sets of clothing, preventing them from practicing good hygiene habits that could prevent louse infestation.Due to fear of an outbreak of epidemic typhus, the US Government put a typhus quarantine in place in 1917 across the entirety of the US-Mexican border. Sanitation plants were constructed that required immigrants to be thoroughly inspected and bathed before crossing the border. Those who routinely crossed back and forth across the border for work were required to go through the sanitation process weekly, updating their quarantine card with the date of the next weeks sanitation. These sanitation border stations remained active over the next two decades, regardless of the disappearance of the typhus threat. This fear of typhus and resulting quarantine and sanitation protocols dramatically hardened the border between the US and Mexico, fostering scientific and popular prejudices against Mexicans.
(1956) In Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, the main character contracts epidemic typhus in the winter following the Russian Revolution, while living in Moscow. (1964) In Nacht (novel) by Edgar Hilsenrath, characters imprisoned in a ghetto in Transnistria during World War II are portrayed infected with and dying of epidemic typhus. (1978) In Patrick OBrians novel Desolation Island, an outbreak of "gaol-fever" strikes the crew while sailing aboard the Leopard. (1980–1991) In Maus by Art Spiegelman, Vladek Spiegelman contracts typhus during his imprisonment at the Dachau concentration camp. (1982) There is a typhus epidemic in Chile graphically described in The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
(1996) In Andrea Barretts novella Ship Fever, the characters struggle with a typhus outbreak at the Canadian Grosse Isle Quarantine Station during 1847. (2001) Lynn and Gilbert Morris novel Where Two Seas Met portrays an outbreak of typhus on the island of Bequia in the Grenadines, in 1869. (2004) In Neal Stephensons The System Of The World, a fictionalized Sir Isaac Newton dies of "gaol fever" before being resurrected by Daniel Waterhouse. See also
Globalization and disease
List of epidemics
Weil-Felix test

References
55. ↑ Alice S. Chapman (2006). "Cluster of Sylvatic Epidemic Typhus Cases Associated with Flying Squirrels, 2004 - 2006" MedscapeCME  Epidemic Typhus Associated with Flying Squirrels -- United States