Hélène Sparrow

Hélène Sparrow, was a Polish medical doctor and bacteriologist. She helped to control epidemics including: typhoid fever, cholera, dysentery, and smallpox. Throughout the 1920s, Sparrow worked with the Polish Armed Forces at the State Institute of Hygiene in Warsaw. While at the State Institute of Hygiene, she produced the first vaccine against typhus and ran vaccination campaigns to control the spread of diphtheria and scarlet fever along the eastern frontiers of Poland. In 1933, Sparrow began to study flea-borne and louse-borne rickettsia diseases in Tunis, where she led her own department at the Pasteur Institute. In her later years, she expanded her studies to include Mexico and Guatemala where she developed a protective vaccine against typhus. She contributed significant research to the World Health Organization on relapsing fever in Ethiopia.