Scrub Typhus in Queensland

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Before moving to Queensland in the 70s from Tasmania, I had never heard of tropical diseases like Melioidosis, Scrub Typhus, Ross River Virus and Dengue Fever.

I recently wrote an article about the tropical disease Melioidosis that has been affecting people in North and Far North Queensland over the last few months following the floods. At the end of that article, I mentioned another tropical disease called Scrub Typhus, which I caught in North Queensland back in the 1970s.



I met my husband in Townsville. At that time, he was studying zoonotic diseases of rats. Zoonotic diseases are diseases which rats can spread to people. I got to travel all over North Queensland and Far North Queensland, collecting live native rats.



We spent our honeymoon on a Field trip collecting rats at Rocky Creek in Far North Queensland. Rocky Creek was a perfect site for scrub typhus due to its abundant rainfall and high humidity. Rocky Creek was a focus for scrub typhus and still remains one. We did catch 24 live native rats on that trip, and scrub typhus was isolated from mites on some of those rats.

I didn’t catch scrub typhus at Rocky Creek, although I did catch it on another rat catching field trip to one of the offshore Islands later that year.

I became extremely ill with a high fever and aches and pains following the camping trip. At that time, I was working at the Townsville hospital, so I went down to the outpatient department and had blood taken, which was sent away South for testing. An elderly infectious diseases physician was very excited when he diagnosed me with scrub typhus. Another doctor told me he was excited because the last case he had seen was twenty years previously and that woman had died. She was a schoolteacher’s wife. I felt dreadful but was very happy he diagnosed me early, and I recovered quickly after taking antibiotics.



Amazingly, I met a woman on a bushwalking trip last year in Brisbane who worked with the teacher whose wife died from scrub typhus. He was the Head teacher at a school my friend worked at and had since remarried. She remembered the story of how his first wife died of scrub typhus many years before.

Scrub typhus is endemic to an area known as the tsutsugamushi triangle, which extends from northern Japan and far-eastern Russia in the north, the territories around the Solomon Sea into Northern Australia in the south, and Pakistan and Afghanistan in the west.

It is a zoonotic disease caused by a bite from minute infected larval mites Leptotrombidium deliense, (chiggers) which live on rats and native marsupials. Its scientific name, Orientia tsutsugamushi, was previously known as Rickettsial tsutsugamushi. It was identified in Japan in 1930. The mites are found in heavy scrub areas, and the bite causes a characteristic black eschar, a hard crust or scab. The scab forms over the initial sore from the chigger bite.

It causes high fever, headache, muscle pain, cough and gastrointestinal symptoms. Many soldiers died from scrub typhus before a cure with antibiotics was discovered in the late 1940s.
Without treatment, the disease is still often fatal. Since the use of antibiotics, deaths have decreased from 4%-40% to less than 2%.

The Atherton Tableland played an important role for our military forces in repelling the invasion of the enemy during World War II. In 1942, General Thomas Blamey investigated and found this area was suitable as a tropical training ground and rehabilitation area. The army set up camp and training facilities to cater for 100,000 troops from Kuranda to Ravenshoe, and Herberton to Kairi. For one brief period between September and November 1944, all three AIF Divisions (6th, 7th and 9th) were on the Tableland at the same time. There were camps at Tinaroo, Kairi, Atherton, Wongabel, Herberton, Wondecla, Ravenshoe and Mt Garnet.



The army established a hospital at Rocky Creek outside Atherton, which became the site of the largest military hospital in the Southern Hemisphere. The 3,000-bed hospital treated over 60,000 patients from 1943 to 1945.

Scrub typhus was a major health problem in jungle warfare during the Second World War in New Guinea, the South Pacific and Far North Queensland. The disease also killed thousands of British soldiers in the Far East. The army feared scrub typhus almost as much as the enemy. According to Professor Harvey Sutton, Director of the School of Tropical Medicine from Sydney University, “scrub typhus was one of the deadliest enemies encountered in jungle warfare”. He wrote in Army News, 18 November 1943, “we are more afraid of scrub typhus than of malaria". It is the most severe and the most baffling of any illness emerging from the Pacific War."

In Papua New Guinea, there were approximately 2,840 cases reported in the Australian Army between March 1942 and December 1945.

After four years of research, British and American scientists completed tests for a new drug called Chloromycetin in 1948, which experts said would reduce scrub typhus deaths. A Colonial Officer announced the new drug would protect British troops fighting in Malaya.

In August 1949, this new drug saved a tourist from Wagga, who almost died from scrub typhus after a trip to the Atherton Tableland. Mrs. F. Wallace became ill at Mackay and was admitted to the hospital, where her condition steadily worsened. Doctors made an urgent application to the Department of Health for a supply of this new drug by air. She made a rapid recovery within a few hours of being treated with the antibiotic.

Unfortunately, the discovery of the Chloromycetin drug cure came too late for an Australian scientist who caught the disease in 1943. The female bacteriologist researcher, Miss Dora Lush was working at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne and caught scrub typhus after accidentally pricking herself with a scrub typhus infected needle. At that time, there was no known serum or drug to treat it.

Even though she knew she was dying, thirty-four-year-old Dora insisted on members of the Institute taking specimens of her blood. Her work was of great military importance because troops in New Guinea had been infected by scrub typhus. The Assistant Director of the Institute at that time, Dr McFarlane Burnett, said Miss Dora Lush was technically the best bacteriologist he had ever worked with and her death was a great loss.

The Commanding Officer Lieutenant Colonel Rod Andrew, of the Medical Division of 2/2 Australian General Hospital, was stationed at Rocky Creek between March 1944 and February 1945 and during that period diagnosed 12 cases of tick typhus, 22 cases of scrub typhus and 13 cases of murine typhus.

In 1942, during a three-day battle exercise between Mirriwinni and Bramston’s Beach in North Queensland, 75 soldiers caught scrub typhus.

When we were at Rocky Creek in 1974, there was no visible evidence of the occupation of military personnel that passed through the area until the end of hostilities in 1945 or the hospital. Most of the buildings had been dismantled after the war except for several, including the igloos from Rocky Creek, Atherton and Wondecla. The Advanced Ordinance Depot occupied 170 buildings and 18 large igloos at Tolga. The bush and farming soon reclaimed the camp and training sites.

I haven’t been back to Rocky Creek, but I know there is a War Memorial Park at the site now on the Kennedy Highway near Tolga with 100 military unit plaques. The units represented have an association with the Rocky Creek Australian Army Hospital and Medical Base 1942 - 46.

The Memorial Park was established in 1995 primarily through the initial efforts of Tim Foley, Mark Alcock and Myra Jones. The Atherton Shire Council is the custodian of the crown land, and the park was developed in an association between the Council and the Rocky Creek War Memorial Park Committee. The units represented in the Memorial Park have an association with the Rocky Creek Australian Army Hospital or the troops that trained or provided unit support in the Atherton Tableland area during World War II. The majority of the plaques in the Memorial Park were funded through the Commonwealth Department of Veterans Affairs' “Their Service – Our Heritage” program, in particular, the Local Commemorative Activities Fund. New memorial plaques are continually being sought.

After World War II, the next time scrub typhus was a problem for Australian soldiers was during the emergency in Malaya between 1955 and 1959. In 1956, only 4 cases of scrub typhus occurred in a battalion of soldiers, but 8 cases occurred in March 1957 after an operation in which the battalion traversed a mite infested area.

The army started using dibutylphthalate treatment on military clothing as it was the only preventative method of protection, and the use of “anti-mite” fluid was reinforced. Despite this, 13 cases of scrub typhus were recorded between July and September 1957. A total of 27 cases were subsequently reported in a battalion group in Malaya between 1957 and 1959.

Scrub typhus was also an important disease among soldiers during the Vietnam conflict. There were sporadic cases of scrub typhus among Australian soldiers in South Vietnam. Australian soldiers were again issued with dibutylphthalate for protection against vector mites.

Studies conducted in Malaysia showed the antibiotic doxycycline could be used as a prophylactic agent against the disease, and this oral drug is used by the army today in troops going into scrub typhus areas for training exercises, including Cowley Beach and El Arish in Far North Queensland. An outbreak amongst soldiers at Cowley Beach in 1996 prompted the recommendation that all Australian Defence Personnel training there use doxycycline prophylaxis. I can’t remember exactly, but I think doxycycline was the antibiotic I took to cure my scrub typhus in 1974.

Scrub typhus is still a health problem for soldiers and civilians in endemic areas. The Ministry of Public Health in Thailand warned forest campers about scrub typhus in December 2014 after five campers died and 8000 people became infected.

We are very lucky now to have antibiotics to cure some of these tropical diseases. Scrub Typhus isn’t a notifiable disease in Queensland, so I don’t know how many cases there are here in the State now.

There was an outbreak in Queensland in 2022 among soldiers from the Australian Defence Force following training events in a coastal location in tropical North Queensland, so it is something to be aware of if you get sick after visiting an endemic area. I did a lot of research for this article years ago, so some of the information may have changed since then.

I have added some photos of some of our native rats provided by Queensland Museum.

I never caught Dengue Fever when I lived in North Queensland, but I did catch Ross River Virus from a mosquito bite, and I also got mammalian meat allergy from a tick bite in Lamington National Park in South East Queensland in 2017 and haven't been able to eat any meat from a mammal since, including lamb, pork, beef.

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