History of mad cow disease

A human version of mad cow disease called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) is believed to be caused by eating beef products contaminated with central nervous system tissue, such as brain and spinal cord, from cattle infected with mad cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy).

The first recorded case of a cow with unusual symptoms was reported in 1984, three days before Christmas in Sussex County, an hour’s drive south of London. A veterinarian was called to examine a cow that ‘had become hypersensitive to noise, apprehensive, unpredictable and aggressive and was having difficulty walking’.

The veterinarian then sent the head from one of the carcasses to the Central Veterinary Laboratory in Weighbridge Surrey for examination. Some sections of the cow’s brain had a strange sponge-like appearance under the microscope. By 2001, cattle in Italy, Spain, Germany, France, Portugal, Belgium and Denmark as well as England were drying of mad cow disease.

As the mad cow epidemic reached its peak in 1992, millions of cattle were destroyed but by then contaminated meat products had probably entered the food chain.

On December 23, 2003, US authorities announced that the first case of mad cow disease in the United States had been found in a Holstein dairy cow in nearby Mabton, Washington.
History of mad cow disease

History of diphtheria

The first human being to suffer from diphtheria may have been infected by a cow. Diphtheria has probably existed since classical antiquity. According to one theory, human beings caught most of these diseases when they first began to domesticate animals back in prehistoric times.

So diphtheria may have first infected people around 3000 BC, when the inhabitants of Mesopotamian tamed the wild aurochs, whose descendants are modern cows.

The disease was recognized as an infectious one but no more than a few stray cases were recognized in England for thirty years.

Diphtheria is a synonyme of the word Diphtherite, originally used by M. Bretonneau in his treaty on this subject, which appeared in 1826 and which is chiefly made up of his own observations on the epidemics of malignant sore throat which prevailed at Tours and in its neighborhood 1818 and again in 1825 and 1826.

In the winter of 1855 to 1856, 366 deaths from diphtheria occurred in the French city of Boulogne. By March 1858 diphtheria reached London, where it remained as endemic disease. In 1858 there was a sudden widespread appearance of severe diphtheria in England and within the year it had spread to almost every part of the globe.

Scientists in Germany and France isolated the pathogen and in 1882, it was observed under the microscope that there were numerous bacilli of an easily recognized shape in the grey ‘false membrane’ which forms on the tonsils in diphtheria.

This disease is especially significant in a modern medical history because diphtheria antitoxin, produced in a Berlin laboratory in 1890 and available on a commercial scale shortly thereafter, was the first effective therapeutic developed though bacteriological research.
History of diphtheria

History of measles

Measles probably began with the start of urban life in the Middle East around 3000 BC.

Some historians believe that a plague that killed a large part of the Athenian army in 430 to 429 BC was measles. As urbanization occurred in subsequent centuries, the proximity or larger populations nurtured epidemics with continued circulation of virus in cities. There were massive epidemics in the Roman Empire starting in 165 and in 251 AD, and two similar epidemics in China in 162 and 310.

Jews physician such as Al Yehudi had recognized the illness but without distinction between it and other rash disordered.

Measles was first documented by an Arabic physician called Rhazes.

Rhazes lived in the 10th century but he quoted other authors on measles form as far back s Al Yehudi, who lived in the 7th century.

He distinguished between smallpox and measles even though he believed that the two conditions were part of one morbid process.

Rhazes referred it the disease as widespread throughout the East and the same opinion is expressed by Avicenna and other Arabic writers of the tenth and eleventh centuries.

By the 17th century, some European also physicians had identified the differences between measles and small pox.

In 1846, a Danish physician Peter Panum studied a measles outbreak on the Faroe Islands and was the first to describe the clinical presentation, incubation and infectious nature of measles.

The introduction of measles vaccine in 1963 and its subsequent widespread use led to dramatic declines in the reported incidence of measles.
History of measles 

Plague of Philistines

The disease dates to ancient times and is thought to have originated in Central Asia.

Plague of Philistines also known as Plague of Ashdod. The epidemic struck the Philistine when they tried unsuccessfully to conquer the Hebrews in the second half of the 11th century BC. It was the first plague epidemic described in the Bible.

The disease has been suggested by many authorities to the first epidemic of bubonic plague, but others attribute the episodes described in the Bible to bacillary dysentery or intestinal schistosomiasis.

The association of rodents with the disease, the location of the swellings, and the rapid spread and high mortality have led some scholars to identify the epidemic as bubonic plague.  In the Old Testament, the first Book of Samuel mentions a plague suffered by the Philistines that had as one of its symptoms boils or tumors.

The ‘swelling in the groin’ experienced by the Philistine suggest the buboes, or swollen lymph glands of Yersinia infection.

The rapidity of transmission suggests this infection, as does the vector of transmission.
Plague of Philistines

History of word of influenza

The earliest mention of a condition with clearly flulike symptoms comes from 1173, but the term ‘influenza’ itself was not used until about 1357.

The word influenza is Italian for influence, as in the astral or occult influence of a visitation or outbreak that affects many people at the same time. Italy’s population suffered many plaques and epidemics, because at the time it was a center of trade and travel.

According to one widely reported explanation, the term refers to an ‘influence of the stars.’ As the star aligned on their position, 15th century Italian thinkers believes the positions of celestial bodies influenced the timing of flu outbreaks.

Other account suggest that the illness as caused by an ‘influence del freddo’ an influence of cold weather. 

The French used the term ‘grippe’ to describe a condition strikes quickly and causes sore throat, cough, runny nose, fever, chills and aching joints. The term ‘grippe’ was used in the United States in the earlier years of the 20th century, especially during the 1918 pandemic.

In Britain in 1485, a disease called the ‘English Sweat’ which had many flulike symptoms, killed thousands of people.

In a severe flu outbreak of 1743 the word influenza was applied to the epidemic that began in Italy and spread throughout Europe. The world influenza is believed to have first been used in English in 1743 when it was adopted, with an anglicized pronunciation, during an outbreak of the disease in Europe.

Since then, the influenza, shortened to flu, means a serious infectious disease characterized by muscle and joint aching, prostration, and respiratory congestion with fever and headache.
History of word of influenza

Mystery of Black Death

The Black Death was one of the worst disasters in history.

Nicephoros Gregoras states that the plaque had broken out at the estuary of the R. Don in spring 1346, while Ibn al-Wardi had gathered information to the effect that the epidemic raged in the land of the Golden Horde in October-November 1346.

All plaque is caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. It was named after the Swiss microbiologist Alexander Yersin, who along with Japanese scientist Shibasaburo Kitasato, finally isolated the bacteria in 1894.

Plague can be passed to a human through the bite of a flea. The bacteria carried by a flea that lives on rodents. When rats lacking any immunity die, the fleas jump to other animals and people sparkling epizootics among the animals and spreading quickly to humans.

In the Old Testament the first Book of Samuel mentions a plague suffered by the Philistines that had as one of its symptoms boils or tumors, which may have been buboes.

An archeologist found an Egyptian medical text called the Ebers Papyrus dating back to 1500 BC. It describes a disease with symptoms including buboes, which modern scientists take to be plague.

The story began somewhere between China and the Crimean Peninsula. Modern theories point to Mongol horsemen disrupting reservoirs of plague-carrying rodents, who entered the stream of commerce and conquest.

The Black Death entered the port city of Messina on the island of Sicily in October 1347. It travelled aboard trade ships en route from the East, where it had decimated populations.

Now it would spread throughout Europe. Over the next years, it quickly spread though England and up into Norway.

Black Death almost killed one-third of Europe’s population between1347-1350. The Black Death killed about 25 million people in Europe alone and probably millions more in Asia. When victims got sick, they developed massive swellings that turned purple and black. Too weak to get out of bed, they began to vomit.
Within two days, they were dead.

People today called the plague ‘the Black Death’ because of the blackened skin of those were infected. But in the years that the disease was active, it was called ‘the Great Mortality’ or simply ‘the end of the world’.
Mystery of Black Death