Category: Infectious Disease
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Leprosy and armadillos: Handle with care
Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden A nine-banded armadillo in the Green Swamp, central Florida. Photo by Tomfriedel (BirdPhotos.com), June 27, 2008, on Wikimedia. CC BY 3.0. Leprosy (Hansen’s disease) is a chronic, disfiguring, and handicapping infectious disease. It was known in the ancient world, and evidence of the disease has been found from 2000 B.C.1…
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Rapid testing for the masses
Anthony PapagiannisThessaloniki, Greece Ten young girls are queueing outside the makeshift surgery. They are between eleven and fifteen, they wear face masks, they giggle and tease each other and try to encourage the timid ones before the coming ordeal. What is this going to be? Their first visit to a gynecologist? Nothing so memorable. They…
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Diagnosis: Neurosyphilis. Treatment: Malaria, iatrogenic
Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden Patient in Kettering hypertherm cabinet undergoing fever therapy. New Orleans, 1937. U.S. Marine Hospital. Works Progress Administration photo. New Orleans Public Library Digital Collections via Wikimedia. Public domain. “The syphilitic man was thinking hard…about how to get his legs to step off the curb and carry him across Washington Street.…
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Dr. Gerhard Domagk and prontosil: Dyeing beats dying
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”– Albert Einstein Dr. Gerhard Domagk (1895–1964) was a German pathologist and bacteriologist whose research led to a discovery that saved innumerable lives. He worked for the Bayer chemical company and was also a professor at the University of…
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When Papa Doc treated yaws
Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden A patient with yaws prior to and two weeks after a single injection of benzathine penicillin. 1950s. From Kingsley Asiedu, Christopher Fitzpatrick, and Jean Jannin, “Eradication of Yaws: Historical Efforts and Achieving WHO’s 2020 Target.” PLoS Negl Trop Dis 8(9), 2014: e3016, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pntd.0003016. Via Wikimedia. CC BY 4.0. “Our Doc…
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Robert Koch, M.D., and the cure for sleeping sickness: ethics versus economics
Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden Primum non nocere. (First, do no harm.)— Hippocrates Robert Koch, M.D., (1843–1910) started his career as a country doctor and discovered the causes of tuberculosis, anthrax, and cholera. He is considered to be, along with Louis Pasteur, the founder of the field of bacteriology. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology…
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Scotland’s Anthrax Island
Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden Cutaneous anthrax lesion on the neck, May 25, 1953. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Public Health Image Library. Via Wikimedia. Public domain. “They make a desolation and call it peace.” — Agha Shahid Ali (1949–2001) During World War Two, the British government purchased from its owners the Gruinard…
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AIDS: Thru a glass darkly
S.E.S. MedinaBenbrook, Texas, United States I sat in the deep, cool shade of a stout, leafy Texas cedar escaping the torrid summer heat, idle thoughts meandering. Cotton-ball clouds grazed lazily across their azure prairie. The pervasive insane miasma swirling like a whirlwind around COVID-19 reminded me of days past when a very different virus dominated…