Anthrax: The Disease and the History
Anthrax is a peracute, acute or sub-acute disease primarily affecting herbivores but also encountered in other mammals, including humans, and occasionally birds.
The words ‘anthrax’ is derived from the Greek anthrakos, meaning coal, referring o the characteristics eschar in the human cutaneous form of the disease.
The familiar name ‘black bane’ and the French and Italian names for the disease charbon and carbonchio, similarly reflect this manifestation.
Names in other languages and older English names refer to other of its significant manifestations or to its sources of infection, viz Milzbrand (German) and miltvuur (Duth), meaning ‘spleen fire’, pustula maligna (Spanish), Bradford disease, woolsorter’s disease, ragpicker’s disease and so on.
Its numerous synonyms in many national languages and local dialects reflect the historical familiarity with the different syndromes before it was realized that they were manifestations of one etiological agent, Bacillus anthracis.
Fifth and sixth plaques of Egypt in the time of Moses are thought by some to have represented the earliest historical; reports of the anthrax due to respectively to systemic and cutaneous forms of the disease.
Anthrax appears to have featured in Asia Minor at the time of Siege of Troy (ca. 1200 BC) an description of the typical symptoms in the writing of Homer (ca. 1000 BC), Hippocrates (ca. 400 BC), Varro (116 – 27 BC), Virgil (70 – 19 BC and Galen (ca. 200 AD) indicate that the Greeks and Romans were well acquainted with it.
Scientifically reports began with the descriptions of malignant pustule and the disease in animals in 1700s.
The nineteenth century saw anthrax as the first disease of man and animals shown to be caused by a microorganism and as the disease on which much of the original work on bacteria and vaccines was done.
Anthrax: The Disease and the History
