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Discovery of the Plague Pathogen: Lessons Learned

2016; Springer Nature; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/978-94-024-0890-4_2

2214-8019

Ruifu Yang, Thomas Butler,

Zoonotic diseases and public health

Plague resulted in three pandemics in history; however, its causative pathogen was isolated until the third pandemic in Hong Kong in 1894. At that time, two famous researchers, Dr. Alexandre Yersin and Dr. Shibasaburo Kitasato, went to HK, in order to identify the pathogen. The two great researchers had done a lot of work to isolate and identify the causative pathogen. However, Dr. Alexandre Yersin reported the real pathogen for plague, and we now acknowledge his work by nominating the pathogen's genus as Yersinia. In this chapter, we discussed the lessons learned from the two researchers' experience on isolation and identification of plague pathogen.