D.P. Burkitt (1911-1993) Irish Physician
Denis Parsons Burkitt was born in Enniskillen on Feb 28 1911, in the same year that the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen became the first man to reach the South Pole. Amundsen had arrived there only five weeks before the British expedition led by Capt. R.F.Scott and a few days before Capt.L.E.Oates from the 6th Inniskilling Dragoons walked out his tent in the Antarctic and died rather than be a burden to his colleagues.
They had sailed from port in Dunedin N.Z. where I myself once had a position with the naval reserve. Burkitt was deeply influenced by the courage of these explorers and intended that he would travel on completion of his medical studies. He joined the British Army as a surgeon and ended up serving in Europe during the Second World War. The War also held up his studies but he finally obtained a M.D. from Trinity College in 1946. He then decided to join the colonial service and became a government surgeon at Makerere University in Uganda in the same year.
In the late 1950's as the cold war was developing, Burkitt sent out hundred of questionnaires to doctors and travelled some 16,000kms across Africa to study hospital records on a form of malignant facial tumour that he was noticing in young boys under twelve years of age. He discovered that the tumour occurred mostly in Uganda and Kenya in areas above 500ft altitude but didn't occur in the islands around Zanzibar.
It was also predominant along the coast and rivers but didn't appear to follow population densities. Burkitt stated that these factors suggested a vector (mosquito) was responsible for transmission of a disease agent (probably a virus). His research demonstrated that the lymphoma was endemic only in the mosquito-ridden equatorial areas and occurred in young children whose immune system was depressed by chronic malaria.
In 1961 he had gathered enough epidemiological data to present his findings to a group of doctors in the Middlesex Hospital. He was probably influenced in returning to speak in London by another doctor , Hugh Trowell who had been in his clinic studying the effect of malnutrition in starving African children. They both noted that patient's in Uganda never appeared to suffer from diverticulitis or colon cancer and they supported the work of Dr. A. Walker from South Africa who postulated the beneficial effects of the native diet. One of the people who was present at the medical meeting was a Londoner called M.A. Epstein.
He had studied medicine in Cambridge University and did his postgraduate training at the Middlesex. Epstein decided to investigate this unusual lymphoma for causative viruses. He was helped in this quest by another Londoner, a scientist called Yvonne Barr. Before long they discovered that they could culture these cancerous B cell lines indefinitely and that they all seemed to contain what biological tests proved to be a new Herpes virus which they called the Epstein-Barr virus.
Around this time Werner and Gertrude Henle discovered an antibody test that was specific for the antibodies formed by the EB Virus. It caused a lot of consternation when a technician who was suffering form glandular fever proved positive for the test and his cell grew the same virus which had previously been isolated by the London team. The new virus was found not only to be the cause of infectious mononucleosis but also to be associated with different pathologies, including a form of nasopharyngeal carcinoma common in southern China.
No comments:
Post a Comment