Gongylonema Pulchrum - History of Discovery

History of Discovery

Gongylonema pulchrum was first named and presented with its own species by Molin in 1857. The first reported case was in 1850 by Dr. Joseph Leidy, when he identified a worm "obtained from the mouth of a child" from the Philadelphia Academy. He originally described it as Filariae hominis oris, and initially considered the worm was a guinea worm (dracunculiasis medeninsis), but because of the unique location of the worm (buccal cavity), and the relatively short size compared to the guinea worm, the hypothesis was disregarded. There have only been around 50 reported human cases of G. pulchrum world wide since 1864, and these infections have been widespread and globally ubiquitous. G. pulchrum infections have been notoriously and historically hard to diagnose due to symptom complaints by patients- this will be touched on later. Also, morphological diagnosis of the parasite is also somewhat complicated because of the variable size of adult worms, and the tendency of the worm to be different lengths depending on what host the worm is recovered from. This will also be discussed in the morphology section.