Tag: Infectious Diseases
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Lassa: The small town with the mark of death
Patrick AshinzeIrrua, Edo State, Nigeria Little has been written about Lassa, a small town plagued by terrorism in northeastern Nigeria. No one has published even a cursory description of its topography or demography, its markets, schools, infrastructure, or the people who come from it. It is now known only as the site of origin of…
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Ancient remedies for modern times
Vicky LiDallas, Texas, United States “To a synthetic chemist, the complex molecules of nature are as beautiful as any of her other creations.”– Elias James Corey (Nobel Lecture, 1990)1 As the Vietnam War raged through the 1960s, the Northern Vietnamese army faced its greatest foe to date: drug-resistant malaria. Malaria typically causes cyclical waves of…
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William Budd and typhoid fever
William Budd. From lithograph published by A.B. Black, 1862. Wellcome Collection. CC BY 4.0. In the year 1811 when William Budd was born, medicine was still in its dark ages. Physicians dressed in black and wore top hats, surgeons operated in street clothes without anesthesia, and infectious diseases such as typhoid and cholera were thought…
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Scrofula or the king’s evil
Scrofula, the old name for tuberculous lymphadenitis of neck, was once a common condition. The name was derived from the ancient Latin scrofa for sow, possibly because the affected nodes were shaped like the swollen neck of a sow or because pigs were particularly prone to the disease. The disease was also called struma, reflecting…
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Book review: Pandemic Obsession: How They Feature in our Popular Culture
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, UK Following the worldwide COVID pandemic, there has been a plethora of books published on the theme of epidemics and pandemics. Readers may be forgiven if they feel they are now suffering from literary pandemic fatigue. However, this interesting new book sets out to describe how pandemics have influenced literary writing throughout…
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The climate cure: Treating tuberculosis in the nineteenth century
Brendan PulsiferAtlanta, Georgia Tuberculosis pervaded nineteenth-century American life like no other disease. More commonly known as consumption at the time, it was responsible for one in five deaths, making it the deadliest pathogen for people across ages, genders, and classes. Doctors often described tuberculosis as the most dangerous illness in their clinical practice because of…
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Palo Seco: A leper colony in Panama
Enrique Chaves-CarballoOverland Park, Kansas The history of leprosy goes back to antiquity and is replete with unscientific prejudices, including the belief that the disease was highly contagious. Therefore, lepers were ostracized from society. It was not until the nineteenth century that Armauer Hansen (1841–1912), a Norwegian physician versed in histopathology, published in 1874 his findings…
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Koch’s postulates revisited
JMS PearceHull, England Van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1722), a Dutch botanist, using his early microscope observed single-celled bacteria, which he reported to the Royal Society as animalcules. The science of bacteriology owes its origin to two scientists of coruscating originality, Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch. Pasteur may be described as master-architect and Koch as master-builder of the…
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Leprosy and armadillos: Handle with care
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden 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 In the sixth and seventh centuries it spread in Europe, peaking in incidence in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.2 The disease may have…
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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…