History
The disease was first reported by Tomisaku Kawasaki in a four-year-old child with a rash and fever at the Red Cross Hospital in Tokyo, Japan in January 1961, and later published a report on 50 similar cases. Later Kawasaki and colleagues were persuaded that there is definite cardiac involvement when they studied and reported 23 cases, of which 11(48%) patients had abnormalities detected by an electrocardiogram. It was not until 1974 that the first description of this disorder was published in the English language literature. in the year 1976 Melish et al., described the same illness in 16 children in Hawaii. Melish and Kawasaki had independently developed the same diagnostic criteria for the disorder, which are still used today to make the diagnosis of classic KD.
A question was raised whether the disease only started during the period between 1960 and 1970, but later a preserved heart of a 7 year old boy who died in 1870 was examined and showed three aneurysms of the coronary arteries with clots, as well as pathologic changes consistent with KD. KD is now recognized worldwide. In the United States and other developed nations, it appears to have replaced acute rheumatic fever as the most common cause of acquired heart disease in children.
Read more about this topic: Kawasaki Disease
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“We know only a single science, the science of history. One can look at history from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and the history of men. However, the two sides are not to be divided off; as long as men exist the history of nature and the history of men are mutually conditioned.”
—Karl Marx (18181883)