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Lumpy Skin Disease

Originally discovered in 1929, lumpy skin disease is caused by a virus that affects cattle. There have been many recent outbreaks in Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, Israel, Russia, and India. Bodies of dead cows littered the streets in India in a recent outbreak, especially in the state of Rajasthan. 

The LSD virus is a Poxvirus. See classification below. Typical symptoms of the disease in cows include fever, skin nodules, and decreased milk production. 

The virus is presumably shuttled from sick cows to healthy cows by ticks and dipterans (flies). The spread of the disease is also likely related to a number of factors such as movement of livestock, seasons and temperature patterns, and ineffective prior vaccination allowing for spread. 

Throughout affected countries, large scale vaccination and surveillance programs are being conducted to prevent outbreaks. Lax vaccination has led to a resurgence in cases in at least one instance in Israel. 

Quite incredible to think that a small virus, 150 kilobases or so, hopping around on ticks and flies can wreak havoc in millions of cattle.

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European Food Safety Authority: https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/topics/topic/lumpy-skin-disease
Yuan et al. Microbiota in viral infection and disease in humans and farm animals. 

The Head from 1898 - by Rohit Godbole, July 2022

Imagine you are going through some old research stuff and then, suddenly, you find a human head in a jar. Indeed, a pedestrian scenario! You might even think to yourself, "There it is! This old thing". Well, that is pretty much what happened in 1892. The decapitated human head pickling in a jar was discovered at the University of Buenos Aires Medical School. And it did belong to someone. Domingo Ezcurra. Ring a bell? 

Domingo Ezcurra was an Argentinian soldier who, one fine day, discovered a spider bite on his face. When the skin lesion bubbled out of control, it no longer seemed related to spiders. It began to involve other areas of his body, like his back and arms. After a lot of testing by his doctor, eventually they saw something. A fungus under the microscopy. 

Dr. Alejandro Posadas, a medical intern at the University, had taken a keen interest in Mr. Ezcurra - the kind of keen interest where, after the patient's death, one stores their decapitated head in a jar. From 1889 to 1898, until his death, Dr. Posadas studied Domingo Ezcurra. I remember being an intern, diving deeper and deeper into a list of possible diagnoses that you have barely heard about. Unlike in Posadas' day where medical interns were probably running the whole hospital, doing everything from gathering the patient's history to scraping their skin or collecting urine and preparing the specimen for the microscope, we now have the lab folks do that these days; doctors now sit at the computer and click things. Regardless, I do actually understand the desire to keep something you have studied so closely, treasured in all its mystery, like a human head, for as long as you can. 

After what sounds like painstaking work, Posadas proposed that Ezcurra's skin lesions were actually due to a fungus which we now know as Coccidiomycosis. In South-Western United States, sometimes we also call it Valley Fever. Domingo Ezcurra eventually succumbed to the infection in 1898.

Alejandro Posadas, the young doctor taking care of Ezcurra, also studied tuberculosis. Unfortunately, Dr. Posadas died soon after Ezcurra's death, at age 31, of consumption from tuberculosis.

Deresinski et al.