Carrion's disease

The Oroya fever ( Carrión 's disease ) is a caused by the bacterium Bartonella bacilliformis produced disease. The New World genus Lutzomyia sandflies of the transfer vector as the bacteria from person to person. The disease occurs on the western slopes of the Andes above 800 m altitude in Peru, Ecuador and Colombia to the habitat of the vector. The bacterium lives primarily in erythrocytes, there is a secondary colonization of the spleen and other organs. The only known reservoir is man. The Oroya fever belongs to the group of Bartonellosen.

Course of the disease

Historical

In the second half of the 19th century, the American entrepreneur Henry Meiggs financed the construction of the highest railway in the world: over the Peruvian Andes from Lima to Oroya in up to 5,000 m above sea level. It was hoped to raise huge amounts of mineral resources there. In all of Peru and Chile, workers were recruited to support the construction. In 1869, the route left the lowlands and reached along the Rimac River heights of over 1000 m. At the track included the Verrugas Bridge. Thousands of railway workers lived under the worst hygienic conditions. In the mass accommodation, a completely new disease occurred. The worker suffered first from a high fever, before thousands of them from severe anemia (anemia ) and due to secondary infections such as miliary tuberculosis, salmonellosis Shigellosen and died. The disease was in this region, however, anything but new.

Reported already in 1540 Valdizan, the military Rapporteur of Francisco Pizarro, from an outbreak of disease among the soldiers, which began with high fever and the survivors blood-filled warts gave rise after some time. This was the oldest written tradition in the relationship between the febrile disease ( Oroya fever ) and the Peru - warts ( Verruga peruana ). This relationship was demonstrated by the fatal self-experiment of the Peruvian medical student Daniel Alcides Carrión (1857-1885), after whom the disease was named later.

However, the warts adorned not only pictorial representations of people on pottery and steles, but even pre-Columbian mummies.

These skills have been forgotten, so that the disease was described in 1915 by Richard Pearson Strong in a scientific expedition from Harvard University under the name of Oroya fever again. The pathogen was discovered in 1905 Alberto Barton.