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Origins, Transmission, and Symptoms of the Disease

The Picardy sweat was an infectious disease of unknown cause and it was the only disease that beared any resemblance to the English sweating sickness. The Picardy sweat is also known as the miliary fever, suette des Picards in French,and picard'scher Schweiß, picard'sches Schweissfieber, or Frieselfieber in German. It appeared in the northern Frenchprovince of Picardy in 1718. The Picardy sweat was mainly confined to the northwest part of France, particularly in the provinces of Seine-et-Oise, Bas Rhin, and Oise. Although the Picardy sweat began in Northern France, outbreaks also occurred in Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, and Italy. Between 1718 and 1874, 194 epidemics of the Picardy sweat were recorded. The last extensive outbreak was in 1906, which a French commission attributed to fleas from field mice. A subsequent case was diagnosed in 1918 in a soldier in Picardy.

There were two types of the Picardy sweat, a benign form that was similar to nephropathia epidemica and a more severe form that resembled the English sweat. The disease was similar to the English sweat but differed in some symptoms and in its course and mortality rate. Additionally, the more severe type of Picardy sweat is believed to be more benign than the English sweating sickness. The rate of sickness was anywhere from 25% to 30% of the population and the mortality rate is estimated to have been between 0% and 20%. Similar to the English sweat, the more severe Picardy sweat was characterized by intense sweating, but the symptoms were less fatal. Some of the symptoms were high fever, rash, and bleeding from the nose. Other symptoms include intense sweating, headaches, suffocation, precordial pain, anxiety, and "passion of the heart" or palpitations. Additionally a miliary rash followed by desquamation, or peeling of the skin, is a fresh feature that was brought on with this variant of the English sweating sickness would typically appear three to four days after infection. Many victims died within two days.

André Chantemesse

The Picardy sweat occurred in limited epidemics, usually for a short duration during the summer months. Additionally, this disease spread predominately in rural villages and communities. André Chantemesse, a French bacteriologist, presented a detailed epidemiological account of the outbreak. Chantemesse argued against human-to-human transmission by discussing specific visits of ill individuals in visits of ill individuals to nearby villages. Additionally, he believed that those who slept on or near the ground were more likely to be infected. Chantemesse called the Picardy sweat, "the virus that came from the fields." Although symptomatology did not match, he believed that this disease was transmitted through flea bites and predicted that the virus came from rodents invading homes after flooding.

Is There A Link Between the Picardy Sweat and the English Sweating Sickness?

The English sweating sickness, also known as Sudor Anglicus, caused five major epidemics between 1485-1551. The location, duration, and violence differed with each respective outbreak. This sickness, named after the devastation it induced in England, had a mortality rate of 30% to 50%. A Noteworthy mention is the English sweating sickness did not attack the younger or the older individuals, but rather the middle-aged individuals in the population. Additionally, these individuals were typically active, wealthy, and white males. The Picardy sweat appeared over 150 years later, in 1718, in France. This outbreak was considered to be much less fatal in comparison to the English sweating sickness. Although there is much speculation about the similarities between the Picardy sweat and the English sweating sickness, it is unknown rather or not the two were derived from one another. Given the two sicknesses have different geographical regions and over a century of time between outbreaks, many speculate that the two are not related. However, other speculations say that both could be a form of what we know today as hantavirus infections. A hantavirus infection is one that is spread mainly through rodents, insectivores, and bats and cause varied disease syndromes. Each type of hantavirus is carried by a specific host species and phylogenetic analysis revealed that the relationships between hantaviruses generally parallel the phylogeny of their rodent hosts.