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A Brief History of Anthrax

Anthrax is a zoonotic disease (one shared by animals and humans) whose causative organism is Bacillus anthracis. Primarily a disease of herbivorous animals, anthrax appears in humans in several different forms: cutaneous anthrax, pulmonary anthrax, and intestinal anthrax with meningeal anthrax being a complication of inhalation, gastrointestinal or cutaneous anthrax. Gastrointestinal and meningeal anthrax are extremely rare and have never been documented in the United States.

Although anthrax has been known since antiquity, it was not always clearly distinguished from other diseases with similar manifestations. Scholars have characterized the fifth and sixth biblical plagues as well as the "burning plague" described in Homer's Iliad as anthrax. However, it was Virgil (70-19 BC) who provided one of the earliest and most detailed descriptions of an anthrax epidemic in his Georgics. Virgil also noted that the disease could spread to humans.

Over the next fifteen hundred years, Europe witnessed sporadic outbreaks of anthrax, with the most acute outbreaks occurring in fourteenth-century Germany and seventeenth-century Russia and central Europe. Despite the threat these outbreaks posed to livestock, it was only in 1769 that Jean Fournier classified the disease as anthrax or charbon malin, a name undoubtedly derived from the black lesions characteristic of cutaneous anthrax. Fournier also noted a link between those who worked with raw animal hair or wool and susceptibility to anthrax.

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