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Malaria
Ronald Ross discovered that the female Anopheles mosquito was responsible for the transmission of Malaria, which is caused by single celled parasites called plasmodia. He used infected birds in order to isolate the parasite and prove his theory. He would later go on to receive the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1902. -
Yellow Fever
Walter Reed M.D. was working in the tropics and proved the suspected connection between Yellow Fever and mosquitos proposed by Cuban doctor Carlos Finlay. The disease is characterized by fever, chills, lose of appetite, nausea, muscle pains, headache. Eventually liver and kidney damage causes the Yellow skin that gave the disease its name. -
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Public Health
The United Public Health Service was founded in order to promote disease prevention programs and advance public health science. In 1906 the Pure Food and Drug Act was passed which prohibited the sale of misbranded or adulterated food and drugs in interstate commerce. This would lay the groundwork for the FDA. -
Typhoid Mary
Mary Mallon was an Irish cook that was a carrier of Typhoid fever and was responsible for spreading the disease in New York City. Typhoid fever is characterized by continued fever, physical and mental depression, rose colored spots on chest and abdomen, diarrhea, and intestinal hemorrhage. She was discovered by George Soper who studied the outbreaks and traced them to her. She was important because she showed officials that it is important to keep track of carriers of diseases. -
Vitamins
Casimir Funk, was a chemist that isolated compounds believed to be amines, but later labeled vitamines and also wrote a book of the same name. In 1916, E.V. McCollum discovered when rats were given vitamines they were healthier than the control group. The discovery of vitamins was a big deal because it showed that there was more to a healthy diet than just proteins, fats, and carbs. Diseases like rickets, beriberi, and pellagra would suddenly become easier to treat and eradicate. -
Pasteurization
Pasteurization is shown to be an effective method in controlling the spread of diseases. It is a process in which packaged and nonpackaged foods like milk are heat treated in order to eliminate pathogens and extend the shelf life. It was named after the microbiologist Louis Pasteur who's research showed that thermal processing destroys unwanted microorganisms. -
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Morbidity
Edgar Syndenstricker developed a morbidity statistics system to help study epidemiology. He classified the statistics into five groups. 1. Reports of communicable diseases. 2. Hospital and clinical records. 3. Insurance and Industrial establishment and school illness records. 4. Illness surveys. 5. Records of the incidence of illness in a population continuously or frequently observed. The study he conducted in 1921 helped illustrate how illness affects people by age groups. -
Framingham Heart Study
In 1948 the FHS was launched in order to determine what are risk factors that lead to the development of cardiovascular disease. The study followed 6,000 individuals over the the course of 30 years. The study identified the diseases of concern were coronary heart disease, rheumatic heart disease, congestive heart failure, angina pectoris, stroke, gout, gallbladder disease, and eye conditions. -
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Polio Vaccine
During this time period multiple polio vaccines were created and tested. An attenuated live vaccine in 1950 made created by Hilary Koprowski was drank. Jonas Salk created an inactivated vaccine in 1955 that was very successful. Lastly another attenuated live oral polio vaccine was created by Albert Sabin in 1961. This helped eradicate the disease from the US and large parts of the world where it has paralyzed people for thousands of years. -
Cigarettes and Cancer
After WW2 statistics began to show that there was a link between smoking and an increase in the risk of developing and dying from lung cancer. By 1964, there had been 29 case-control studies and 7 cohort studies published that all had the same conclusion. -
Prion
In 1987 Stanley Prusiner coined the term prion which is a combination of the words protein and infection. At the University of California, San Francisco, his team managed to purify and isolate the infectious protein. He would later go on to win the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1997 -
HIV/AIDS
In 1983, Robert Gallo and Francoise Barre-Sinoussi with Luc Montagnier independently declared that a novel retrovirus had been infecting people and published their findings in the same issue of the Journal of Science. Though some of their findings contradicted each other and they named their virus differently. They would later be renamed HIV.