In all this time however, every attempt at biological warfare has been essentially offensive. The idea has always been to incapacitate or kill the enemy. Except once, in Poland, during World War II, where a pair of quick-thinking doctors used a little-known organism to keep the Nazis at bay.

The microorganism is Proteus OX19. In most ways it’s an entirely ordinary little bacterium. Its one remarkable feature is that human antibodies for Proteus OX19 cross-react with the antibodies for Ricksettia – the bacterium responsible for the deadly disease typhus. Blood from a patient infected with Proteus Ox19 will give a false-positive in the most common typhus screening method, the Weil-Felix test.

Enter the Nazis into Poland....

I had never heard of this before, but it's an interesting story. Outbreaks of typhus were not uncommon in Easteen Europe and a false positive test could have saved someone from deportation or worse...
- Bruno (guest) 10-09-2006 3:56 am [add a comment]