History of Shigella

History of Shigellosis

The intestinal amebiasis, a similar disease to shigellosis caused by the bacteria Entamoeba histolytica was first described by Fedor Losch in 1875. Scientists in American, Europe, and Japan suspected a bacterial agent to be also responsible for shigellosis, a nonamebic intestinal disorder. The disease was feared for its high mortality rate among children.

The bacterium Shigella dysenteriae was discovered by Japanese bacteriologist Kiyoshi Shiga in 1897. At the time, Dr. Shiga was working as a research assistant in the Institute for Infectious Disease under the direction of Dr. Shibasaburo Kitasato, the famous Japanese scientists who cultivated Clostridium tetani and studied plague bacteria in Hong Kong. Dr. Kitasato directed Shiga's attention to an investigation of a sekiri (dysentery) outbreak. The Japanese word sekiri means "red diarrhea," a more accurate description of the disease than the generic term dysentery used to describe a variety of diarrheal diseases. The 1897, more than 90,000 cases of sekiri occurred with a mortality rate of more than 20%.

Dr. Shiga studied 36 patients at the Institute for Infectious Disease and isolated the bacteria from the intestinal tissue of a dysentery patient. When the bacteria was cultivated and fed to dogs, it caused disease. Dr. Shiga discovered that the bacterium, which he named Bacillus dysenterie, excreted toxins, later named Shiga toxins, that caused shigellosis. In 1930, it was the Bergey's Manual of Determinative Bacteriology that renamed the bacteria Shigella. In the 1950s, the four species of Shigella (group A, B, C, and D) were assembled together taxonomically. Following the discovery of the causal agent of shigellosis, Dr, Shiga worked on a vaccine for the disease, and even testing the first killed-cell vaccine on himself. A hundred years after Dr. Shiga's discovery, a vaccine has yet to be developed.

History

Shigella organisms are a group of gram-negative pathogens, which were...