Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that answer the question.
Query: Who identified melioidosis?
Pathologist Alfred Whitmore and assistant Krishnaswami first reported the disease among beggars and morphine addicts at autopsy in Rangoon, present-day Myanmar, in a report published in 1912. They distinguished it from glanders, a disease of humans and animals that is similar in presentation, but caused by a different micro-organism. "B. pseudomallei", also known as the Whitmore bacillus, was identified in 1917 in Kuala Lumpur. Arthur Conan Doyle may have read the 1912 report before writing a short story that involved the fictitious tropical disease "tapanuli fever" in a Sherlock Holmes adventure.
Group C
Michigan State University, Kellogg Biological Station: Eminent Ecologist (1992)
The genus "Neisseria" is named after the German bacteriologist Albert Neisser, who in 1879 discovered its first example, "Neisseria gonorrheae", the pathogen which causes the human disease gonorrhea. Neisser also codiscovered the pathogen that causes leprosy, "Mycobacterium leprae". These discoveries were made possible by the development of new staining techniques which he helped to develop.
Albert Ludwig Sigesmund Neisser (22 January 1855, Schweidnitz – 30 July 1916, Breslau) was a German physician who discovered the causative agent (pathogen) of gonorrhea, a strain of bacteria that was named in his honour ("Neisseria gonorrhoeae").
Recognition of antibiotic tolerance dates back to 1944 when Joseph Bigger, an Irish physician working in England, was experimenting with the recently discovered penicillin. Bigger used penicillin to lyse a suspension of bacteria and then inoculated culture medium with the penicillin-treated liquid. Colonies of bacteria were able to grow after antibiotic killing. The important observation that Bigger made was that this new population could again be killed by penicillin except for a small residual population. Hence the residual organisms were not antibiotic resistant mutants but rather a subpopulation of what he called ‘persisters’. The formation of persisters is now known to be a common phenomenon that can occur by the formation of persister cells prior to the antibiotic treatment or in response to a variety of antibiotics.
For decades biologists had been at work on the medicine that became penicillin. In 1928, Scottish biologist Alexander Fleming discovered a substance that killed a number of disease-causing bacteria. In 1929, he named the new substance "penicillin". His publications were largely ignored at first, but it became a significant antibiotic in the 1930s. In 1930, Cecil George Paine, a pathologist at Sheffield Royal Infirmary, used penicillin to treat sycosis barbae, eruptions in beard follicles, but was unsuccessful. Moving on to ophthalmia neonatorum, a gonococcal infection in infants, he achieved the first recorded cure with penicillin, on November 25, 1930. He then cured four additional patients (one adult and three infants) of eye infections, but failed to cure a fifth.
Another group working contemporaneously with the Montagnier and Gallo groups was that of Dr. Jay Levy at the University of California, San Francisco. He independently discovered the AIDS virus in 1983 and named it the AIDS associated retrovirus (ARV). This virus was very different from the virus reported by the Montagnier and Gallo groups. The ARV strains indicated, for the first time, the heterogeneity of HIV isolates and several of these remain classic examples of the AIDS virus found in the United States.
Alexander Fleming had first discovered penicillin by accident in 1928, but at that time believed it had little application. When Florey and his team recognised the potential of the discovery for combating bacterial infection, they faced the problem of how to manufacture penicillin in sufficient quantities to be of use. Heatley, although the junior member of the team, possessed a natural gift for ingenuity and invention. It was he who suggested transferring the active ingredient of penicillin back into water by changing its acidity, thus purifying the penicillin.
An important discovery was made by Patrick Manson in 1877 that mosquito could transmit human filarial parasite. Inferring from such novel discovery Albert Freeman Africanus King proposed the hypothesis that mosquitoes were the source of malaria. In the early 1890s Manson himself began to formulate the complete hypothesis, which he eventually called the mosquito-malaria theory. According to Manson malaria was transmitted from human to human by a mosquito. The theory was scientifically proved by Manson's confidant Ronald Ross in the late 1890s. Ross discovered that malaria was transmitted by the biting of specific species of mosquito. For this Ross won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1902. Further experimental proof was provided by Manson who induced malaria in healthy human subjects from malaria-carrying mosquitoes. Thus the theory became the foundation of malariology and the strategy of control of malaria.
The Greek physician Hippocrates, the founder of scientific medicine, was the first to deal with the anatomy and the pathology of human spine. Galen developed an interest in anatomy from his studies of Herophilus and Erasistratus. The concept of studying disease through the methodical dissection and examination of diseased bodies, organs, and tissues may seem obvious today, but there are few if any recorded examples of true autopsies performed prior to the second millennium. Though the pathology of contagion was understood by Muslim physicians since the time of Avicenna (980–1037) who described it in "The Canon of Medicine" (c. 1020), the first physician known to have made postmortem dissections was the Arabian physician Avenzoar (1091–1161) who proved that the skin disease scabies was caused by a parasite, followed by Ibn al-Nafis (b. 1213) who used dissection to discover pulmonary circulation in 1242. In the 15th century, anatomic dissection was repeatedly used by the Italian physician Antonio Benivieni (1443-1502) to determine cause of death. Antonio Benivieni is also credited with having introduced necropsy to the medical field. Perhaps the most famous early gross pathologist was Giovanni Morgagni (1682-1771). His magnum opus, "De Sedibus et Causis Morborum per Anatomem Indagatis", published in 1761, describes the findings of over 600 partial and complete autopsies, organised anatomically and methodically correlated with the symptoms exhibited by the patients prior to their demise. Although the study of normal anatomy was already well advanced at this date, "De Sedibus" was one of the first treatises specifically devoted to the correlation of diseased anatomy with clinical illness. By the late 1800s, an exhaustive body of literature had been produced on the gross anatomical findings characteristic of known diseases. The extent of gross pathology research in this period can be epitomized by the work of the Viennese pathologist (originally from Hradec Kralove in the Czech Rep.) Carl Rokitansky (1804-1878), who is said to have performed 20,000 autopsies, and supervised an additional 60,000, in his lifetime.
In 1820, Justinus Kerner, a small-town German medical officer and romantic poet, gave the first complete description of clinical botulism based on extensive clinical observations of so-called “sausage poisoning”. Following experiments on animals and on himself, he concluded that the toxin acts by interrupting signal transmission in the somatic and autonomic motor systems, without affecting sensory signals or mental functions. He observed that the toxin develops under anaerobic conditions, and can be lethal in minute doses. His prescience in suggesting that the toxin might be used therapeutically earned him recognition as the pioneer of modern botulinum toxin therapy.
Also known as Hashimoto's disease, Hashimoto's thyroiditis is named after the Japanese physician Hakaru Hashimoto (1881−1934) of the medical school at Kyushu University, who first described the symptoms of persons with "struma lymphomatosa", an intense infiltration of lymphocytes within the thyroid, in 1912 in a German publication. The report gave new insight into a condition (hypothyroidism) more commonly seen in areas of iodine deficiency that was occurring in the developed world, and without evident causation by dietary deficiency.
Among the first scientists to explore the Muirkirk Deposit was Maryland state geologist Phillip Thomas Tyson. He brought some of the strange bones discovered in the iron mines to a meeting of the Maryland Academy of Sciences in 1859, where his colleagues identified them as dinosaurs. Paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh was also interested in Maryland fossils. In the winter of 1887, he sent John Bell Hatcher to search the iron mines. Hatcher recovered hundreds of fossils, including the remains of ancient turtles and crocodiles. In the 1890s, Smithsonian Institution scientists Charles Gilmore and Arthur Bibbins also visited Prince George's County, uncovering dinosaur teeth and other fossils that were added to the Smithsonian collection.
Type 1 and type 2 diabetes were identified as separate conditions for the first time by the Indian physicians Sushruta and Charaka in 400–500 CE with type 1 associated with youth and type 2 with being overweight. The term "mellitus" or "from honey" was added by the Briton John Rolle in the late 1700s to separate the condition from diabetes insipidus, which is also associated with frequent urination. Effective treatment was not developed until the early part of the 20th century, when Canadians Frederick Banting and Charles Herbert Best isolated and purified insulin in 1921 and 1922. This was followed by the development of the long-acting insulin NPH in the 1940s.
Type 1 and type 2 diabetes were identified as separate conditions for the first time by the Indian physicians Sushruta and Charaka in 400–500 AD with type 1 associated with youth and type 2 with being overweight. The term "mellitus" or "from honey" was added by the Briton John Rolle in the late 1700s to separate the condition from diabetes insipidus which is also associated with frequent urination. Effective treatment was not developed until the early part of the 20th century when the Canadians Frederick Banting and Charles Best discovered insulin in 1921 and 1922. This was followed by the development of the long acting NPH insulin in the 1940s.
The 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Montagnier and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi for the discovery of HIV. They shared the Prize with Harald zur Hausen, who discovered that human papilloma viruses can cause cervical cancer. Montagnier said he was "surprised" that Robert Gallo was not also recognized by the Nobel Committee: "It was important to prove that HIV was the cause of AIDS, and Gallo had a very important role in that. I'm very sorry for Robert Gallo." According to Maria Masucci, a member of the Nobel Assembly, "there was no doubt as to who made the fundamental discoveries."
Many vaccines for infectious diseases are produced in fertile chicken eggs. The basis of this technology was the discovery in 1931 by Alice Miles Woodruff and Ernest William Goodpasture at Vanderbilt University that the rickettsia and viruses that cause a variety of diseases will grow in chicken embryos. This enabled the development of vaccines against influenza, chicken pox, smallpox, yellow fever, typhus, Rocky mountain spotted fever and other diseases.
With the outbreak of World War II, weaponization of botulinum toxin was investigated at Fort Detrick in Maryland. Carl Lamanna and James Duff developed the concentration and crystallization techniques that Edward J. Schantz used to create the first clinical product. When the Army’s Chemical Corps was disbanded, Schantz moved to the Food Research Institute in Wisconsin, where he manufactured toxin for experimental use and generously provided it to the academic community.
Fossils of "Smilodon" were discovered in North America from the second half of the 19th century onwards. In 1869, American paleontologist Joseph Leidy described a maxilla fragment with a molar, which had been discovered in a petroleum bed in Hardin County, Texas. He referred the specimen to the genus "Felis" (which was then used for most cats, extant as well as extinct) but found it distinct enough to be part of its own subgenus, as "F." ("Trucifelis") "fatalis". The species name means "fate" or "destiny", but it is thought Leidy intended it to mean "fatal". In an 1880 article about extinct American cats, American paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope pointed out that the "F. fatalis" molar was identical to that of "Smilodon", and he proposed the new combination "S. fatalis". Most North American finds were scanty until excavations began in the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, where hundreds of individuals of "S. fatalis" have been found since 1875. "S. fatalis" has junior synonyms such as "S. mercerii", "S. floridanus", and "S. californicus". American paleontologist Annalisa Berta considered the holotype of "S. fatalis" too incomplete to be an adequate type specimen, and the species has at times been proposed to be a junior synonym of "S. populator". Swedish paleontologists Björn Kurtén and Lars Werdelin supported the distinctness of the two species in 1990.
Based on whole genome sequencing, humans may play a role in moving "B. pseudomallei" from place to place.
In the subgroup of patients where an inoculating event was noted, the mean incubation period of acute melioidosis was 9 days (range 1–21 days). Patients with latent melioidosis may be symptom-free for decades; the longest period between presumed exposure and clinical presentation is 62 years. The potential for prolonged incubation was recognized in US servicemen involved in the Vietnam War, and was referred to as the "Vietnam time-bomb". A wide spectrum of severity exists; in chronic presentations, symptoms may last months, but fulminant infection, particularly associated with near-drowning, may present with severe symptoms over hours.
Melioidosis is a recognised disease in animals, including cats, goats, sheep, and horses. Cattle, water buffalo, and crocodiles are considered to be relatively resistant to melioidosis despite their constant exposure to mud. An outbreak at the Paris Zoo in the 1970s (""L’affaire du jardin des plantes"") was thought to have originated from an imported panda.
He was also a keen entomologist and did important work on the identification and classification of mosquitos and mosquito larvae. When an outbreak of a new disease in the Malayan rubber plantations occurred in 1917 he was able to identify the cause as an outbreak of melioidosis, caused by a bacterial contamination of groundwater.
Tropical disease specialist William A. Sodeman, Jr., proposed that "Tapanuli fever" was melioidosis, a conclusion supported by physician Setu K. Vora. Vora raised the possibility that Conan Doyle read the first report of melioidosis published in 1912 before writing his short story in 1913.