The Epidemic Commission of the League of Nations (LNEC) was considered at the time of its creation to be the ‘first essay in international cooperation’, in that, contrary to other health and relief organisations, its funds proceeded not from a charitable public, but from national governments. The Commission acted exclusively through local health administrations, basing its work on ‘the necessity of strengthening the public health and sanitary organisation of the country as the most effective and the most lasting means of checking the spread of epidemics’. Although the Epidemic Commission lasted little over three years (April 1920–December 1923) and worked in only five countries (Poland, Soviet Russia and Ukraine, Latvia and Greece), it marks one of the early ‘success stories’ of the League of Nations Health Organisation (LNHO) which it preceded and, indirectly, had a large part in creating.

Typhus and the First World War

The Epidemic Commission (initially called the Typhus Commission) was born to fight the louse, as the vector of typhus, a rickettsial infectious fever which leads ‘the quiet bourgeois existence of a reasonably domesticated disease’ in times of peace and flares up into epidemics when basic sanitary conditions break down.