Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever:
What is It and How Did We Find Out?
What is Rocky Mountain spotted fever?
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Research Before the Canyon Creek Schoolhouse Laboratory
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When Dr. Charles Stiles of the U.S. Public Health Service came to the Bitterroot Valley in 1904 to study RMSF, he couldn’t replicate Chowning and Wilson’s findings of a protozoa that caused RMSF, so he pronounced that the tick theory was incorrect. None of them realized that they were looking for the wrong type of pathogen. The search for a definitive answer to the cause of RMSF continued.
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Dr. Charles Wardell Stiles became the first director of the Division of Zoology of the Hygienic Laboratory (precursor to the National Institutes of Health) in 1902. While incorrect about the vector for RMSF, he did important work on hookworm disease.
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Image: Office of NIH History and Stetten Museum, 1588 | ||||
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It was Dr. Howard T. Ricketts who confirmed Chowning and Wilson’s theory about ticks being carriers of RMSF. A pathology professor at the University of Chicago, he set up an experimental station at the Northern Pacific Hospital in Missoula, Montana, in 1906, where he did microscopic studies on samples from people with RMSF. He also conducted the animal studies necessary to see how RMSF was spread.
Ricketts proved that ticks transmitted RMSF from animals to humans by placing ticks on infected guinea pigs and then moving the tick to healthy guinea pigs, who then got ill. He also identified the bacteria that causes RMSF in the blood of infected animals and in ticks and their eggs; that bacteria are now called Rickettsia rickettsii in his honor. A whole group, or genus, of very small bacteria that cause diseases in humans after insect bites is called Rickettsia, and the diseases they cause are called Rickettsial diseases, in his honor. As Ricketts was winding up his RMSF studies, he went to Mexico to study typhus; he died there of typhus in 1909.
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