Clothing can kill. So, too, can the absence of personal protective equipment. For decades, the medical establishment has understood the role of fabric in both spreading contagion and guarding against its transmission — but never with greater urgency than 80 years ago.
On April 15 1945, British troops liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp near Celle in northern Germany. Shocking scenes awaited behind the barbed wire.
On entry, British personnel found an epidemic of typhus decimating the camp’s surviving population. Thousands of unburied corpses, appallingly overcrowded huts, the absence of running water and chronic emaciation contributed to the rapid spread of this louse-borne disease. So too did unwashed garments into which lice burrowed and deposited their contaminated faeces.
