science · 03 May 1910 · 114 years ago
death
Died 3 May 1910 at age 39 (born 9 Feb 1871).
Howard Taylor Ricketts was an American pathologist who discovered the causative organisms and mode of transmission of Rocky Mountain spotted fever and epidemic typhus. In 1906, Ricketts, a Univeristy of Chicago pathologist, demonstrated that Rocky Mountain spotted fever is spread by cattle ticks and caused by a blood-borne "bipolar bacillus." In 1910 he showed that typhus is caused by a similar organism carried by lice. Ricketts was in Mexico City investigating the disease (known in Mexico, as tabardillo) that year when he was stricken by typhus and died at age 39. The two organisms Ricketts discovered were the first of what were later shown to be an unusual genus of virus-like bacteria - now named the Rickettsiae.
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