Echinococcosis - History of Discovery

History of Discovery

Echinococcosis is a disease that has been recognized by humans for centuries. There has been mention of it in the Talmud. It was also recognized by ancient scholars such as Hippocrates, Aretaeus, Galen and Rhazes. Although echinococcosis has been well known for the past two thousand years, it wasn’t until the past couple of hundred years that real progress was made in determining and describing its parasitic origin. The first step towards figuring out the cause of echinococcosis occurred during the 17th century when Francisco Redi illustrated that the hydatid cysts of echinococcosis were of “animal” origin. Then, in 1766, Pierre Simon Pallas predicted that these hydatid cysts found in infected humans were actually larval stages of tapeworms. A few decades afterwards, in 1782, Goeze accurately described the cysts and the tapeworm heads while in 1786, E. granulosus was accurately described by Batsch. Half a century later, during the 1850s, Carl von Siebold showed through a series of experiments that Echinococcus cysts do cause adult tapeworms in dogs. Shortly after this, in 1863, E. multilocularis was identified by Rudolf Leuckhart. Then, during the early to mid 1900s, the more distinct features of E. granulosus and E. multilocularis, their life cycles and how they cause disease were more fully described as more and more people began researching and performing experiments and studies. While E. granulosus and E. multilocularis were both linked to human echinococcosis before or shortly after the 20th century, it wasn’t until the mid 1900s that E. oligarthus and E. vogeli were identified as and shown as being causes of human echinococcosis.