The History of Streptococcus Pneumoniae
- The first time the symptoms of someone infected with streptococcus pneumoniae was described was in the 2nd century C.E. Aretaeus of Cappadocia, a Grecian physician, described the sufferings of his patient but did not know the symptoms were caused by bacteria. Throughout the ages, wherever people were clustered in small closed communities like prisons or schools, streptococcus pneumoniae would cause a microcosmic epidemic because of its highly infectious nature.
- Two individuals worked on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean to isolate streptococcus pneumoniae and grow it in a culture. Louis Pasteur of France was the first to publish his report, in January 1881, after finding the bacteria in the saliva of a youngster with rabies. George Miller Sternberg of the United States sampled his own saliva and successfully grew the bacteria as a culture in September 1880, but did not publish his report until April 1881.
- In April 1884, Albert Fraenkel, a German doctor, found streptococcus pneumoniae bacteria in samples taken from the throats and mouths of patients who had lobar pneumonia. The Gram stain had been invented in 1884, and it was used to identify differences between pneumonia-causing microbes. Fraenkel published his findings in 1886 at the same time that Anton Weichselbaun published a similar report. The bacteria became known as Fraenkel-Weichselbaun's diplococcus or Fraenkel's bacillus.
- In 1928, Frederick Griffith tried to come up with a vaccine against pneumonia. He took virulent and nonvirulent strains of streptococcus pneumoniae and combined them in such a way as to transform the microbes through their DNA. This was one of the first cases of genetic engineering in the laboratory.
- In 1911, scientists attempted to find an effective vaccine against the pneumonia caused by streptococcus pneumoniae. When penicillin came into popular use in the 1940s, patients were inoculated with that in the belief that the penicillin would kill the infection. Many patients died. By the 1960s, a true pneumonia vaccine was again sought. The first pneumococcal vaccine was produced and licensed in November 1977. This vaccine was composed of the 14 serotypes known to cause about 80 percent of all bacteria-caused pneumococcal cases in the United States. Two vaccines which covered 23 serotypes were produced and licensed in July 1983.
- From 2001 to 2003, scientists at Instituto de Tecnologia Química e Biológica da Universidade Nova de Lisboa found streptococcus pneumoniae bacteria which were resistant to usual drug treatments. Their samples came from children attending 13 day care centers in the city of Lisbon.