Allergic to penicillin? Then you could be shot full of something that came out of a Sardinian sewer. Here’s the backstory of the important medicine that we found floating around in our own feces.
Typhoid fever is a life-threatening sickness. Although it’s rare in areas with good drinking water purification systems, worldwide it claims 200,000 lives every year. Even when scientists found out that the fever was the result of a bacterial infection, usually picked up through contact with sewage already containing the bacteria, direct treatments were hard to come by, and there was little they could do to purify water supplies for entire regions.
This is why Giuseppe Brotzu, an Italian professor of hygiene, was so surprised that the people in one particular area suffered a very low rate of typhoid casualties during a 1948 epidemic.