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His students and his rivals used his methods to discover the causative organisms of many other diseases including typhoid, diphtheria, tetanus, leprosy, gonorrhoea, syphilis, and coccal infections such as pneumonia and meningitis. Early in bubonic plague broke out in Canton and Hong Kong, the start of the third great plague pandemic. Two bacteriologists immediately began working independently from one another to isolate and culture the causative organism of the plague; Shibasaburo Kitasato, a previous pupil of Robert Koch, and Alexandre Yersin, from the Pasteur Institute.
On June 12 a Japanese team of researchers led jointly by Shibasaburo Kitasato and Aoyama Tanemichi arrived in Hong Kong to try to identify the organism responsible for the plague.
Kitasato was a renowned Japanese bacteriologist who worked with Emil von Behring and Robert Koch in Berlin where they developed antitoxins for tetanus and diphtheria. Kitasato found bacilli in the bubo pus, blood and organs of a plague victim who had died. He cultured the bacillus on broth culture and inoculated mice and other animals who died with the same bacilli in their blood. He had also studied under Robert Koch in Germany and in was awarded the Paris Medical Faculty bronze medal for his work on animal tuberculosis and the diphtheria exotoxin.
After plague had broken out in Hong Kong in he was asked by the Pasteur Institute to leave Vietnam and go to Hong Kong to try to isolate the plague organism, taking with him a microscope and an incubator as his only equipment. Yersin arrived in Hong Kong in June three days after Kitasato, Kitasato was already at work, but with a sophisticated laboratory and a staff of twenty or so.
Yersin was not able to either obtain hospital laboratory facilities or to be able to work alongside Kitasato, and instead set up a rudimentary laboratory in a hut near the Hong Kong Hospital and had to make do with working on hospital patient corpses. A week into his stay, one of the mice he had inoculated with pus taken from a bubo on a corpse, died.
In the following week he successfully obtained pure cultures of the bacillus on medium. He also demonstrated for the first time that the same bacillus was present in the rat as well as in the human disease, indicating its possible means of transmission. During June both Kitasato and Yersin announced isolation and culture of the plague bacillus. The patient is prostrated. Abruptly, a high fever sets in, often accompanied by delirium.
On the very first day a discrete bubo usually appears. The nodule rapidly reaches the size of an egg. Death occurs after 48 hours and often sooner. If the patient manages to survive 5 to 6 days, the prognosis is better, the bubo softens and one can operate to aspirate the pus. In a few cases, the bubo does not form, and one will note in such cases haemorrhages in the mucous membranes or petechial spots on the skin. While working on the bacillus Yersin had also noticed that the streets of Hong Kong were littered with dead rats.
It had been observed throughout history, such as by Avicenna in Persia in the 11th century and by Nathaniel Hodges in in his work Loimographia, or an historical Account of the Plague in London in , With precautionary Directions against the like Contagion that a plague of dead rats often heralded an epidemic in people. When all the rats die the fleas actively seek new hosts, people and their domestic animals being the closest, thus propagating an epidemic. In on his return to the Pasteur Institute, Yersin, in collaboration with Amedee Borrel and Albert Calmette, both Pastorien bacteriologists, began experimenting with an anti-plague serum and in Yersin went to back Bombay to continue trialling his antiserum, although he had poor success as only half of his patients survived.
Yersin died in his home in Nha Trang in where his grave is honoured as that of a national hero. In the bacillus was reclassified as a different genus to Pasteurella and was renamed Yersinia pestis.
Simond earned his medical doctorate in and was awarded the Godard prize for his dissertation on leprosy in French Guyana. In he was sent to India by the Institute to replace Yersin and continue his work on the antiserum for plague. References 1. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Yersinia pestis, the cause of plague, is a recently emerged clone of Yersinia pseudotuberculosis. Proc Natl Acad Sci ; 96 24 : Echenberg M. Plague Ports. Marriott E. Natural history of plague: perspectives from more than a century of research. Ann Rev Entomol ; Genotyping Orientalis-like Yersinia pestis, and plague pandemics. Emerging Inf Dis ; 10 9 : Raoult D, Drancourt M. Yersinia Pestis and Plague. University of Marseille.
Dobson M. Quercus: London, Porter S. The Great Plague. Phoenix Mill, Gloucestershire; Sutton Publishing, In : WHO. Plague and Other Yersinia Infections. Rosen W. New York: Viking Penguin, Gottfried RS. The Black Death. London: Robert Hale Ltd, Halsall P.
Medieval Sourcebook: Procopius: The Plague, Tikhomirov E. Epidemiology and Distribution of Plague. Morony MG. In : Little LK. Plague and the End of Antiquity: The Pandemic of Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Zeigler P. Godalming, Surrey: Bramley Books, Garrison F H. An Introduction to the History of Medicine. Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. Nearly years after the Black Death swept through Europe, it still haunts the world as the worst-case scenario for an epidemic.
Called the Great Mortality as it caused its devastation, this second great pandemic of Bubonic Plague became known as the Black Death in the late In the realm of infectious diseases, a pandemic is the worst case scenario. It connected communities and allowed them to share After construction workers digging tunnels for the new Crossrail train line in discovered some 25 skeletons buried under Charterhouse Square in the Clerkenwell area of London, scientists immediately suspected they had stumbled on a plague cemetery.
The square, once home to The flu was first observed As human civilizations flourished, so did infectious disease. Large numbers of people living in close proximity to each other and to animals, often with poor sanitation and nutrition, provided fertile breeding grounds for disease.
And new overseas trading routes spread the novel The horrific scale of the influenza pandemic—known as the "Spanish flu"—is hard to fathom. The virus infected and killed at least 50 million worldwide, according to the CDC.
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