Diphtheri A Fatal Disease Before 1920 Killing More...

Introduction I chose diphtheria for my term paper because it was a fatal disease before 1920 killing more children than any other disease. Each year there were more than 200,000 cases of diphtheria in the United States. Nowadays this disease is not that widespread and limited mostly to the countries of the Third World. This was achieved due to discovery of immunization. However, we still observe cases of diphtheria in the developed countries that do not have regular immunizations (Frey and Tish 2011). In 2014, there were more than 7,000 outbreaks of this disease in the world. Taking into account that 5-10% of those cases resulted in death, we should not underrate diphtheria as a life-threating pathogen (â€Å"Clinicians†, accessed April 10,2016). History Greek physician Hippocrates was first who mentioned diphtheria. It happened in the fifth century BC. The name of the disease comes from the Greek world diphthera, which means leather hide (â€Å"Epidemiology and Prevention of Vaccine-Preventable Diseases†, accessed April 17,2016). It refers to the pseudomembrane that appears in the throat of those who become infected with diphtheria. However, even before that, there were works dedicated to diphtheria in Egypt. The first epidemics were mentioned in the works of Aetius in the 6th century AD. In the 17th century the massive epidemic of diphtheria broke out in Europe. By the 18th century it had spread to the United States (Johnston 2011). In 1883 a German pathologist Edward Klebs was