El Instituto de Higiene y la enseñanza de la Bacteriología en Chile / The Institute of Hygiene and the teaching of Microbiology in Chile

El Instituto de Higiene, fundado por el gobierno de Chile en 1892, aparte de sus funciones en el ámbito de la salud pública, participó activamente en la docencia de pregrado de Bacteriología de la Escuela de Medicina de la Universidad de Chile. La cátedra de Bacteriología fundada en 1895 fue trasladada en 1902 a la sección de seroterapia de dicho instituto (uno de los cinco edificios que formaban el instituto). La cátedra permaneció en ese lugar por tres décadas, siendo trasladada en 1930 por el Dr. Hugo Vaccaro de vuelta a la Escuela de Medicina. Por otra parte, la cátedra extraordinaria de Bacteriología siguió ligada a dicho instituto y a su inmediato sucesor el Instituto Bacteriológico de Chile. Sin embargo, luego del incendio de la Escuela de Medicina en 1948, la cátedra ordinaria tuvo que retornar a sus antiguos edificios en la ribera del Mapocho y paralelamente la cátedra extraordinaria se trasladó a una nueva ubicación en Ñuñoa.

The Institute of Hygiene, founded by the Chilean government in 1892, apart from its functions in the field of public health, actively participated in the undergraduate teaching of Bacteriology at the School of Medicine of the University of Chile. The chair of Bacteriology founded in 1895 was transferred in 1902 to the serotherapy section of the mentioned institute (one of the five buildings that made up the institute). The chair remained in that place for three decades, being transferred by Dr. Hugo Vaccaro back to the School of Medicine in 1930. On the other hand, the Extraordinary Chair of Bacteriology continued to be linked to the said institute and to its immediate successor, the Bacteriological Institute of Chile. However, after the fire at the School of Medicine in 1948, the ordinary chair had to return to its old buildings on the banks of the Mapocho and at the same time the extraordinary chair moved to a new location in Ñuñoa.

A good career start can open doors: the plusses and minuses of an international graduate student program-a student's perspective.

There are many Ph.D. programs from various funding agencies that provide excellent starts to a scientific career. Multinational Ph.D. positions attract students because they provide students with much-required exposure to the international scientific community at an early stage of the career. For this reason, multinational Ph.D. positions can be considered as a better career opportunity over Ph.D. positions confined to a single country. In addition, these multidisciplinary research programs connect different organizations to deal with the problems of global interest. One of these multi-disciplinary research programs is the viral and bacterial adhesion network training-innovative training network (ViBrANT). ViBrANT is a multifaceted platform that develops the required skillsets in young researchers and thereby also contributes to building a multidisciplinary research community. Is this the only parameter to be considered or are there other factors that can also stimulate one's career development? In this perspective article, I will discuss the key reasons why I chose a multinational Ph.D. program along with the merits of being part of ViBrANT. I also discuss the challenges I faced while moving from India to the United Kingdom.

[A Japanese in Marburg : Excerpts from the Memories - Jiden - of the Japanese Bacteriologist Taichi Kitashima (1870-1956)]. / Ein Japaner in Marburg : Aus den Erinnerungen ­ Jiden ­ des japanischen Bakteriologen Taichi Kitashima (1870­1956).

The heart of this article is the transmission of selected chapters from the Japanese bacteriologist Taichi Kitashima's (1870-1956) autobiographical memoirs (in Japanese, Jiden) published in 1955, in which Kitashima reports on his stay in Marburg in a very personal and subjective way. Like other Japanese physicians of his generation, Kitashima spent several years in Germany in order to work with the serum researcher Emil von Behring and continued his education there. The contact came through Kitashima's teacher Shibasaburô Kitasato, who had worked with Behring in Berlin on questions of immunology. The memoir gives insight into Behring's laboratory work and his relation to his "subordinates". The editors investigate to what extent Kitashima's assessment, made from a distance of fifty years, of his stay in Germany as "wasted time" was accurate, given the advantages that arose from having been part of a vibrant European scientific community, including encounters in the Pasteur Institute in Paris, and why he cultivated his contacts with Germany and the Behring family during National Socialism.

Illustrating microorganisms: Sir William Watson Cheyne (1852-1932) and bacteriology.

Sir William Watson Cheyne is largely known to medical history as Lord Lister's 'trusted assistant'.1 He spent a lifetime defending Joseph Lister's (1827-1912) antiseptic principle in the wake of scepticism and misunderstanding. However, his main contribution to Lister's work was in the embryonic field of bacteriology in the 1870s-1890s, which brought him into contact with continental researchers, particularly Robert Koch (1843-1910). In this field, Cheyne built an independent reputation as an assessor, chronicler and promoter of continental laboratory methodology. He pioneered bacteriological training in British teaching hospitals and incorporated laboratory testing into case notes as standard procedure. This paper reconsiders Cheyne's contribution to the development of bacteriology in British medicine at the end of the 19th century. It examines his motives in promoting new laboratory techniques and the methods he used to embed them in hospital procedure. It also considers how he continued to use bacteriological arguments to keep the Listerian antiseptic principle on the medical agenda well after Lister withdrew from active involvement in the field.

Using a microbial physiologic and genetic approach to investigate how bacteria sense physical stimuli.

A laboratory exercise was designed to illustrate how physical stimuli such as temperature and light are sensed and processed by bacteria to elaborate adaptive responses. In particular, we use the well-characterized Des pathway of Bacillus subtilis to show that temperature modulates gene expression, resulting ultimately in modification of the levels of unsaturated fatty acids required to maintain proper membrane fluidity at different temperatures. In addition, we adapt recent findings concerning the modulation by light of traits related to virulence such as motility and biofilm formation in the chemotropic bacterium Acinetobacter baumannii. Beyond the theoretical background that this activity provides regarding sensing of environmental stimuli, the experimental setup includes approaches derived from classic genetics, microbiology, and biochemistry. The incorporation of these kind of teaching and training activities in middle-advanced Microbiology or Bacterial Genetics courses promotes acquisition of general and specific techniques and improves student's comprehension of scientific literature and research.

VetBact - culturing bacteriological knowledge for veterinarians.

In 2004, Karl-Erik Johansson, then professor of veterinary bacteriology at the veterinary school at Uppsala in Sweden, was asked by his students for a list of the most important bacteria and the diseases that they cause. So began the development of VetBact, an online database giving details of the bacterial species with most relevance to veterinary medicine. The non-commercial database, www.vetbact.org, has since grown and can now be accessed by veterinarians and others worldwide.

An innovative pay-for-performance (P4P) strategy for improving malaria management in rural Kenya: protocol for a cluster randomized controlled trial.

BACKGROUND: In high-resource settings, 'pay-for-performance' (P4P) programs have generated interest as a potential mechanism to improve health service delivery and accountability. However, there has been little or no experimental evidence to guide the development or assess the effectiveness of P4P incentive programs in developing countries. In the developing world, P4P programs are likely to rely, at least initially, on external funding from donors. Under these circumstances, the sustainability of such programs is in doubt and needs assessment. METHODS/DESIGN: We describe a cluster-randomized controlled trial underway in 18 health centers in western Kenya that is testing an innovative incentive strategy to improve management of an epidemiologically and economically important problem--diagnosis and treatment of malaria. The incentive scheme in this trial promotes adherence to Ministry of Health guidelines for laboratory confirmation of malaria before treatment, a priority area for the Ministry of Health. There are three important innovations that are unique to this study among those from other resource-constrained settings: the behavior being incentivized is quality of care rather than volume of service delivery; the incentives are applied at the facility-level rather than the individual level, thus benefiting facility infrastructure and performance overall; and the incentives are designed to be budget-neutral if effective. DISCUSSION: Linking appropriate case management for malaria to financial incentives has the potential to improve patient care and reduce wastage of expensive antimalarials. In our study facilities, on average only 25% of reported malaria cases were confirmed by laboratory diagnosis prior to the intervention, and the total treatment courses of antimalarials dispensed did not correspond to the number of cases reported. This study will demonstrate whether facility rather than individual incentives are compelling enough to improve case management, and whether these incentives lead to offsetting cost-savings as a result of reduced drug consumption. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ClinicalTrials.gov Registration Number NCT01809873.

Emanuel Edward Klein's role in the establishment of food preservation standards.

OBJECTIVES: To evaluate Emanuel Edward Klein's role in the establishment of food preservation standards in terms of critiques of his work, taking his experimental investigations into account. STUDY DESIGN: Historical revision of Klein's experimental investigations of food preservation. METHODS: Descriptive, comparative and analytical methods were used to evaluate Klein's achievements in public health. RESULTS: Presentation of Klein's six papers on food preservation. CONCLUSION: Klein's experimental work was of significant value for the development of food preservation standards for hams, milk and, most importantly, oysters, mussels and other shellfish.

[The institutionalization of bacteriology in Japan].

Within the history of public health in Japan, Shibasaburo Kitasato is widely known for introducing bacteriology to Japan in the Meiji. This paper looks into the factors behind the success of the Institute of Infectious Diseases(IID), which Kitasato headed, focusing specifically on Kitasato's strategy, institutional rivalries in the medical world and early development in the field of bacteriology. Kitasato used IID to spread bacteriology through a bacteriology training course and the publication of a professional journal, both modeled on the German system, which Kitasato absorbed during his previous studies in Germany under Robert Koch, who was one of the founders of bacteriological science. At the time, doctors related to the university system and those related to sanitary administration competed for leadership in the medical world in Japan. The latter had pushed for IID to be established, and the outbreak of plague in 1899 gave them the opportunity to successfully lobby the Diet into passing legislation that enlarged enrollment in the bacteriology course and earmarked money specifically to IID. In the late 19th century, the application of knowledge from the nascent field of bacteriology led to major advances in the fight against infectious diseases, which led to rapid accumulation of knowledge about bacteria, in turn. Thus, Kitasato emphasized that bacteriology should be mission-oriented and based in sanitary administrations. Indeed, as sanitary administrations were on the frontline of the battle against infectious diseases and as IID laboratories were connected to the sanitary administrations, IID succeeded in dominating the field of bacteriology.

A game for teaching antimicrobial mechanisms of action.

BACKGROUND: Alternative teaching tools have proved to enhance students' interest and knowledge skills. AIM: To integrate basic Bacteriology with mechanisms of action of antimicrobial agents. METHODS: The board has 121 squares, including squares with question marks and antimicrobial agents. Each student receives a card with a clinical case, identification of the bacterium and its resistance to antimicrobials. The student rolls a dice and moves the corresponding number of squares. The game depends on the dice values rolled, the bacterial resistance profile, and the questions the student has to answer each time he/she lands on a question mark. Previously, the students were given a lecture about the subject. On the day of the game, students answered a pre-test and a post-test. The paired t-test was used for the statistical analysis. RESULTS: The game was applied to 78 students of the Medicine and Pharmacy undergraduate courses of the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. There was an increase in the number of right answers and a decrease in the number of unknown answers. There were no significant differences between the courses. CONCLUSION: The game could be applied to other undergraduate courses in the field of Health Sciences.

Appearance of bacteriology in the British medical school curriculum.

Published histories of bacteriology concentrate on the scientific concepts, exemplified by Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch. Arguably, the early British bacteriological studies are headed by Lord Lister, whereas other notables such as Ronald Ross, Robert Bruce and Patrick Manson are honoured for their discoveries of 'tropical' microbes, accomplished abroad. What then was happening in Great Britain? The introduction of bacteriology into the medical school curriculum is examined according to the published lectures in The Lancet between 1889 and 1901 and the dates are reviewed in light of other published sources. The names of the people delivering bacteriology at the medical schools in Great Britain and Ireland provide a guide to the relevance of crediting Lister as the leading light for microbiology in the UK. The diversity of names and backgrounds suggests that a critical reassessment of the perceived late and limited start of UK medical bacteriology is needed.

Virulence-defective strains of Salmonella enterica serovar Typhi as candidates for education at level 2 facilities.

The use of biosafety level 3 pathogens is an essential element of education and training at medical schools. We previously reported on invasion-defective strains of Salmonella enterica serovar Typhi, GTC 3P408 (DeltainvA, DeltasipB) and GTC 3P409 (DeltainvA, DeltasipB, and DeltaviaB), as candidates for use in educational programs. Vi negative strains of S. enterica serovar Typhi became extremely sensitive to complement attack but showed increased invasiveness. Therefore, this study was conducted to construct two virulencedefective strains, GTC 3P460 (DeltainvA, DeltasipB, and DeltarpoS) and GTC 3P461 (DeltainvA, DeltasipB, DeltaviaB, and DeltarpoS), of S. enterica serovar Typhi by deleting rpoS from the GTC 3P409 and GTC 3P408 strains. Stress tests demonstrated that GTC 3P460 and GTC 3P461 are sensitive to conditions of starvation, acid stress and oxidative stress. These results suggest that these virulence-defective strains have difficulty surviving in the gastric environment and in macrophages, characteristics that make them ideal candidates for education at level 2 facilities. Colony morphology and conventional biochemical features of these strains are identical to the parent strain S. enterica serovar Typhi GIFU 10007.