Tag: Infectious Diseases
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Ship fever: A malignant disease of a most dangerous kind?
Richard de GrijsSydney, Australia During the Age of Sail, “road,” “workhouse,” “hospital,” “army,” “camp,” “emigrant,” “jail”/“gaol,” and “ship” were routine noun adjuncts pertaining to the deadly fevers frequently occurring in overcrowded spaces in cold weather. Although “fever” diagnoses were common, most such instances in ships’ surgeons’ journals related to typhus or typhoid fevers—until 1869, they…
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Martinus Beijerinck: A co-discoverer of viruses
Philip LiebsonChicago, Illinois, United States As early as 1676, Dutch textile worker Anthony Van Leeuwenhoek, working with an early microscope, was the first to identify bacteria. Because of the size of bacteria, easily seen by a microscope, it was inevitable that bacteria would be discovered by someone. Not so with viruses. Although the smallest bacteria…
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Salvador Luria and the bacteriophage
Philip LiebsonChicago, Illinois, United States In 1859, the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed that if an organism is changed by environmental stimuli, these changes would be passed on to offspring. This theory was eventually disproven. One important study disproving this concept led to the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for Salvador Luria, Max Delbrück,…
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Propagating penicillin in Peoria: From discovery to mass production
Julius BonelloMichael NeffZoe DemkoPeoria, Illinois, United States One of the greatest medical achievements of the twenty-first century was the creation of penicillin. The road to this great achievement began almost 300 years ago when Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723), a draper by trade who had no science background, wished to assess the quality of his threads.…
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Epidemics: The deadly foes of humanity
There was a time when humans may have solely attributed their illnesses to powers that could turn rivers into blood, kill firstborns, unleash swarms of frogs, lice, flies, and locusts (Exodus 7-10), cause contagious skin diseases (Leviticus 13:2-33), or send hideous, dangerous serpents to kill evildoers (Numbers 21:5-9).1 But in the relatively brief time of…
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Measles again
JMS PearceHull, England “Measles is tearing through the UK, spooking health chiefs and parents alike.”– Daily Mail, 25 Jan 2024 Measles is notoriously infectious. Ninety percent of people exposed to an infected person will contract the disease. In many countries, because of misguided anti-vaccine activists, Measles Mumps Rubella (MMR) vaccination rates have fallen in recent…
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The final illness of Thomas Wolfe
Thomas Clayton Wolfe was one of the most important American novelists and short story writers of the early 20th century. When he died as a young man in 1938, he joined the long list of literati victims of the dreaded “captain of these men of death”—John Keats, Percy Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Louis Stevenson,…
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Sporozoites: The elusive assassins
Jayant RadhakrishnanChicago, Illinois, United States Almost 5,000 years ago, the Chinese described a disease that presented with intermittent fevers, enlarged spleens, and a predilection to epidemics. Those malarial infections were possibly caused by Plasmodium vivax (P. vivax) since P. malariae is unlikely to cause epidemics. The Chinese did not mention mortality following these symptoms; therefore,…
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The history of scarlet fever
Scarlet fever is a highly contagious infectious disease that probably has existed for thousands of years. Ancient texts from China and other parts of the world have described symptoms resembling those of scarlet fever. In the 5th century BC, Hippocrates documented a patient with a reddened skin and fever. Centuries later, in 1553, the Sicilian…
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The problem with drinking (water) on airplanes
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Water, water everywhere/Nor any drop to drink.”– The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) In the year 2020, 4.5 billion people flew on commercial aircraft. The previous year saw US airlines carry over 900 million passengers, and only 13% of Americans had never flown on a plane.1 Water is…