The Relationship of the Habits of the House Mouse and the Mouse Mite (Allodermanyssus Sanguineus) to the Spread of Rickettsialpox

IT was prophetic that one of the early and undoubtedly most widely read reports of Rickettsialpox should have appeared in The New Yorker in August, 1947.1 At the time of the Kew Gardens outbreak in 1946, in-vestigations established Rickettsia akari as the etiologic agent of the disease and identified the role played by the mite, Allodermanyssus sanguineus, and the house mouse in transmitting the disease to man.2'8f * Until a small out-break occurred in an apartment house in Hartford in 1952,5 only two other naturally occurring cases, both from Boston,6*7 had been reported beyond the metropolitan limits of New York City. This sharp confinement of the disease to urban districts and its unpredictable appearance in other localities suggested that some explanation for its distribution might be found in a better understanding of the habits of the house mouse and the mouse mite. An early impression that the house mouse was rather addicted to a higher standard of living led to a study of the relationship of the distribution of cases to economic levels in various sections of the city. The results of