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Discovery of Diphtheria Antitoxinserum
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2007-9-26
Diphtheria is an old disease which originates fro Greek "diphthe-ria", meaning hidden leather. In the late 19th century, diphtheria was a common fatal disease to children. Only in Germany, there were about 100,000 children annually infected and the death toll reached almost 50%. And among the children who died of disease, half of whom were of diphtheria.
In 1883, Klebs first found klebsloeffle bacillus in the pseudomembrane of the patients and proved its correlation diseases. In 1884, Loffler succeeded in pure bacterium culture. And in 1890 German surgeon Behring and Japanese bacteriologist Kitasato successfully applied diphtheria antitoxinserum to curing a diphtheria patient. Ever since then, diphtheria antitoxinserum had soon been popularized and the death toll of diphtheria was accordingly reduced from 62% to 10%, amounting to millions throughout the world. In 1901 Behring became the laureate of the first Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In 1909, Smith discovered the methods in eliminating diphtheria toxin; in 1888 Emil Roux and Alexandre Yersin extracted diphtheria toxin, the first bacteriotoxin in history. During 1922-1923, Ramon and others obtained toxoid from diphtheria toxin by the attenuate formaldehyde process, an epochal preventing preparation for diphtheria precaution popularized across the nation. In the next 40 years, the diphtheria precaution preparation has roughly undergone three phases, that is, Phase of Mixed Preparation of Toxin and Antitoxin (1912-1923), Phase of Fluid Toxin (1923-1932) and Phase of Refined Absorptive Toxin (after 1932).
In 1940, Holt applied aluminium phosphate to absorbing refined toxin and reduced the vaccination reaction. Now the refined anatoxin diphtheria and refined anatoxin with the aluminim adjuvant absorption have been widely used throughout the world, and included into the planned immunity program to control the incidence rate of diphtheria at an extremely low level. In US, Japan, and Swiss, there¡¯re no diphtheria cases for many years. The discovery of diphtheria antitoxinserum has uncertained the history in conquering a number of complicated cases in the 20th century.
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Organizer:
Beijing Municipal Association for Science & Technology
Undertaker: Beijing Science & Technology
Consulting Center,
Information Center of Beijing Municipal Association for
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