Modern history of chicken pox

Muhammad Ibn Zakariya Razi, also known as Razi, collected some of the first known information on chickenpox and noted the differences between the measles and small pox. Giovanni Filippo (1510-1580) of Palermo gave the first description Chicken Pox. In 1600s, English Physician named Richard Morton mistook this disease with small pox he thought it was a milder form of smallpox.

It's believed the disease was brought to the Americas in the 15th century by European explorers and settlers. Once on the continent, it (and other diseases) spread among Native Americans since Indigenous people had not previously been exposed to the virus.

In 1767, English physician William Heberden demonstrated that small pox was different from chicken pox. He showed that chickenpox is different from the more deadly disease, smallpox. He also showed that once a person has had chickenpox, that person usually never gets it again.

In modern times, the scientists who first described the chickenpox were E.Paschen, 1919; EE Tyzzer, 1906; von Bokay 1909. Paschen described elementary bodies in smears of vesicles obtained from patients with varicella while Ernest Tyzzer developed a bedside test to distinguish smallpox from chickenpox based on the presence of multinucleated cells in varicella lesions that were not found in smallpox. In 1888, von Bókay of Budapest reported the relationship between herpes zoster and chickenpox. He was first pointed out when he reported cases of the latter disease in members of two families after episodes of herpes zoster in other members.

Prior to 1995, when the chickenpox vaccine was introduced, nearly all U.S. children got infected with chickenpox by age 10. Although usually mild, rare complications resulted in more than 10,000 hospitalizations and 100 deaths per year.

In the 1950s, scientists isolated the varicella-zoster virus for the first time, paving the way for efforts to vaccinate against chickenpox and shingles. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first chickenpox vaccine in 1995 and the first shingles vaccine in 2006.
Modern history of chicken pox

Influenza virus: History and discovery

While the medical profession had started to recognize flu as an infectious disease in the early 1890s, four decades of laboratory work had failed to determine its cause or put its diagnoses and control on firm laboratory footings. The term “influenza” was coined by an Italian in the mid-1700’s to connote a disease resulting from miasma (bad air).

The human disease is thought to have arisen about 6000 years ago. When the influenza pandemic struck in 1918, most scientists and doctors believed it was caused by bacteria. Killing up to 100 million people worldwide, the pandemic was the deadliest in history.

A human influenza virus was not isolated until 1933. Wilson Smith, Christopher Andrews, and Patrick Laidlaw first identified the virus that causes human influenza. They discovered that they could use ferrets to isolated a ‘filterable virus’ from flu patients and with this research animal, begin to determine flu’s identity as a ‘virus disease’. Their finding was publishing in The Lancet, a British medical journal.

Seven years later, the influenza B various was isolated and 10 years after that influenza virus was isolated.

The twenty-first century’s first influenza pandemic caused by the commonly referred ‘swine flu’ virus strain (H1N1) 2009 has had a major economic impact across the world and accounted for 414,000 confirmed cases and 5,000 death worldwide.

The 2005 completion of the entire genome sequence of the 1918 H1N1 pandemic influenza virus represents both a beginning and an end. Investigators have already begun to study the virus in vitro and in vivo to better understand its properties, pathogenicity, transmissibility and elicitation of host responses.

Influenza virus: History and discovery

History of influenza

In March of 1918, American soldiers training in Camp Function, Kansas, suddenly came down with a particular strong strain of the flu.

Many of those who got sick, contracted pneumonia because their bodies were so weak from having been so ill.

The term influenza stems for the Latin word influere, which means ‘flowing into’ or ‘creeping into’. People in fifteenth-century Italy thought the sickness was caused by the ‘influence’ of the stars, so they named it ‘influenza’.

During 3000 BC to 2000 BC, influenza first time capable of infecting humans. It probably arises in central Asia.

The earliest descriptions of influenza are commonly attributed to Hippocrates. In the writings of Hippocrates in 412 BC there is a description of an epidemic in North Greece with symptoms similar to influenza.

Roman historian Livy who lived between 59 BC and 17 AD described a flu-like disease that attacked the Roman army and the enemy soldiers they were fighting.

Between 1781 and 1782, an influenza pandemic infected two-thirds of Rome’s population and three-fourths of Britain’s population. The disease continued to spread in North America, the West Indies and South America.

The spread of this pandemic culminated with an influenza epidemic in New England, New York and Nova Scotia in 1789.

While influenza has afflicted humans for centuries, it has been claimed that it was in the nineteenth century that influenza became an endemic, disease in the majority of the countries in the world, regularly producing large epidemic and pandemics. The first worldwide pandemic of influenza happened in 1833.

In 1940 the influenza B virus was isolated and the influenza C virus in 1949. Since 1945, an active influenza vaccination has been available.
History of influenza

History of Marburg virus

Marburg virus was first identified in 1967 during simultaneously outbreaks in Germany and Yugoslavia among laboratory workers handling African green monkeys and/or tissues from contaminated monkeys imported from Uganda.

The causative agent was cultivated from the blood of sick humans and as customary for arboviruses and other zoonotic viruses was named Marburg virus after the site where the viral samples were obtained.

Although the total number of cases was small, the epidemic created alarm because the mortality rate was high over 25% and treatments such as antibiotics were powerless against the disease.

At the initial outbreak in 1967 thirty one persons came down with an acute illness and fever and seven of them died before the virus was identified.

The disease next appeared in 1975. A young Australian man who had been hitchhiking through central and central Africa died shortly after admission to a Johannesburg hospital.

His female traveling companion and a nurse who looked for him also contacted the disease and both survive.

In December 1998 a protracted epidemic of Marburg hemorrhagic fever virus, broke out in an isolated area of north-east Congo causing upward of 83% mortality among gold miners who have been working in bat infested caves.

Marburg viral RNA and antiviral IgG antibody were detected in a common species of fruit bat, Rousettus aegyptiacus, trapped in caves in Gabon in 2005 and 2006.

 The first case of Marburg hemorrhagic fever in the United States was detected in a traveler returning to Colorado from a trip to Uganda in January 2008.

He had visited the bat-infested ‘python cave in Queen Elizabeth Park. He recovered however, another visitor from Netherlands acquired a fatal case in July that year.

History of Marburg virus

History of Ebola

In 1976, a double epidemic in Africa of unknown, highly fatal viral hemorrhagic fever led to the discovery of a new virus. The outbreaks resulted in 430 deaths with more than 550 cases.

Together with the Marburg virus it was subsequently defined as the prototype of new virus family, Filoviridae, characterized by genetic material carried by only one thread of RNA with negative polarity.

In the next 20 years, an additional 18 outbreaks of Ebola virus infections in humans have been recognized.

Ebola virus is named after a rover in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where is was first discovered.

The source of these outbreaks was never determined. These outbreaks were followed by several smaller outbreaks in the late 1970s.

In 2008, tissue samples from pigs that died of unknown causes in the Philippines were analyzed and found to contain Ebola-Reston virus. This was the first time that the virus was found in a mammalian species other than primates.

According to history the Great Plaque of Athens struck Greece between 430 and 425 BC. Some historians believe it killed one-third to one half of Greece’s population – up to three hundred thousand people. Experts believe that the plaque of Athens was an epidemic of Ebola virus.

The researchers said that Ebola symptoms and the plaque symptoms reported by Thucydides in his books The History of the Peloponnesian War were very similar.

History of Ebola

Discovery of viruses

Understanding of the viruses evolved in the late 1800 from their results of experiments done by a number of scientists.

In 1892, Iwanowski at St Petersburg discovered a new phenomenon by transmitting the tobacco mosaic disease to health plants by rubbing them with bacteria-free extracts of disease leaves.

Six years later Martinus Beljerinck (1898), a Dutch microbiologist, made the same observation and proposed that tobacco mosaic disease was caused by an entity different from bacteria and called it contagium vivum fluidum – a living infectious fluid that would multiply only in living plant cells, but could survive for long periods in a dried state.

Danish scientists Vilhelm Ellerman and Oluf Bang reported the cell free transmission of chicken leukemia in 1908, and in 1911 Peyton Rous discovered that solid tumors of chicken could be transmitted by cell free filtrates. These were the first indications that some viruses can cause cancer.

A major breakthrough came in 1935 when Stanley , an organic chemist succeeded in purifying TMV. This tobacco mosaic virus multiplies in the laves of tobacco plants and the cells become saturated with it.

The first pictures of viruses were seen using powerful electron microscope was only in the 1930s. It is only in the last 60 years that the most of the different kinds of virus have been discovered.

Discovery of viruses