Treatment of Scrub Typhus with Chloramphenicol

This 20-sen stamp is one of three that Malaysia issued on February 6, 1976, to mark the 75th anniversary of the Institute for Medical Research (IMR) in Kuala Lumpur, with the set covering beriberi, malaria and scrub typhus. This value commemorates the first successful antibiotic treatment of scrub typhus, carried out in 1948 by a multinational team using chloramphenicol. The design, by IMR artist Lee Eng Kee, places an orange larval mite and a gray rat in scrub forest beside a syringe of chloramphenicol, two capsules and a man, on a light green ground between orange-red borders lettered in white. The mite is a Leptotrombidium chigger, the vector of the bacterium Orientia tsutsugamushi, which causes the disease. According to entomologists James M. Brennan and M. Nadchatram, it was the first chigger ever shown on a postage stamp. Harrison & Sons printed the stamp by offset lithography in a vertical format of about 26mm by 37mm.¹²³