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Throughout the 20th century, US public health and immigration policies intersected with and informed one another in the country's response to Mexican immigration. Three historical episodes illustrate how perceived racial differences influenced disease diagnosis: a 1916 typhus outbreak, the midcentury Bracero Program, and medical deportations that are taking place today. Disease, or just the threat of it, marked Mexicans as foreign, just as much as phenotype, native language, accent, or clothing. A focus on race rendered other factors and structures, such as poor working conditions or structural inequalities in health care, invisible. This attitude had long-term effects on immigration policy, as well as on how Mexicans were received in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

El artículo describe las condiciones y expansión de la epidémica de tifus de la ciudad de México al comienzo del siglo 20. Es esbozan esfuerzos por científicos para controlar la epidémica, así como hipóteses sobre las animales portadores de la epidémica. Se describen las investigaciones de Dr. Mooser sobre la causa de la epidémica.

The health condition in Mexico was bad around de beginning of the revolutionary period. The movement of troops led the development of epidemics like yellow fever, typhus, smallpox, and influenza that were enhance with natural disasters and hunger in whole country, from cost to cost and in the north big cities like Monterrey, Guadalajara and Saltillo. Doctor Liceaga conducted a well planned campaign against yellow fever eradicating water stagnant deposits in order to combat the vector transmission, the Aedes aegypti, mosquito with satisfactory results. The first smallpox epidemic in the XX Century in Mexico was in 1916. The Mexican physicians used the smallpox vaccine against this epidemic. An American physician named Howard Taylor Ricketts arrived to Mexico for studying the typhus transmission. Accidentally he had been infected and finally, he died from typhus. Definitively, the epidemics predominate along de revolutionary period in Mexico [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article studies the effects of the agricultural crisis of 1809-1811 and the typhus epidemic of 1813-1814 on the incidence of burials, baptisms, and marriages in the parish of Atlacomulco, Mexico. In particular, it examines the link between hunger and disease as they relate to this crisis. Further, the article looks at how the demographic aspects of the crisis exacerbated the struggle between Indians and land owners over the control of land and how Atlacomulco emerged in favor of the cause of Mexican independence leader Miguel Hidalgo.

The typhus epidemic is caused by Rickettsia prowazekii and is transmitted by lice, mainly in proletarian populations in rural regions of southern Mexico. In Nuevo Leon so far we have no reported cases, probably because the diagnosis is not made with unspecific laboratory tests such as the Proteus OX 19, which suggests that the disease is eradicated. We report a case of a female patient aged 16, from the rural area of Nuevo Leon (Cadereyta Jimenez) who presented abdominal pain, myalgia, arthralgia, headache, fever, mental confusion and weight loss in eight days evolution. Background refers infestation of lice in the family. The diagnosis was established by positive reactions to febrile Proteus OX-19 with certification of 1:4000, taken a week of the onset of the disease. Six hours after his admission, was requested another sample that was reported in 1:16000; the quadrupling of the result confirmed the diagnosis of the disease. The verification diagnosed typhus epidemic was established during the convalescence of the patient, a month later through the identification of IgG and IgM antibodies specific for Rickettsia typhi by indirect immunofluorescence, with results in IgG and IgM positive titers from 1:256 to 1:64, with reference values for the two titers in 1:64. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health education and propaganda acquired importance during the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Mexico City, as physicians, hygienists, and schoolteachers attempted to teach the principles of public health to a culturally and socially heterogeneous urban population.I explore the organization of the Popular Hygiene Exhibition of 1910 and the importance of health education before and after the armed phase of the Mexican Revolution, and why children and the indigenous populations became the main recipients of health education programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]