Hematology all time.

Picture taken from John H. Cummings and Amanda Engineer. Denis Burkitt and the origins of the dietary fi bre hypothesis. Nutrition Research Reviews (2018), 31 , 1 – 15 Burkitt resigned his surgical post in Mulago Hospital in 1964. But he stayed in Kampala for two years as the external scientific staff of the Medical Research Council. He observed that the incidence of some cancers varied considerably in different locations. He was primarily interested in continuing research in occurrence and distribution of cancer in Africa.  But he left Africa mainly because of the changes occurring in post- independent Uganda and returned to London on 14 February, 1966 and continued to work with the Medical Research Council for 10 years. He never had the idea that diet could have a role in cancer or other diseases.  His idea changed when he got introduced to Peter Cleave, a retired Naval Medical Officer, by Sir Richard Doll. This pave

Dennis Burkitt. Picture taken from https://mccarrison.com/visionaries/burkitt/ Denis Parsons Burkitt was born in February 1911 in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, Ireland. His father, James Parsons Burkitt, a civil engineer, was the county surveyor for Fermanagh and also a reputed innovative ornithologist. His father used the technique of ringing or banding to recognize individual birds and meticulously mapped their territories. Burkitt as a child was impressed by his father, whose techniques he used later for mapping the tumour distribution in Africa. Within the family, two strong influences clearly laid the foundations for young Burkitt future life. One was service to the British Empire, where Burkitts three paternal uncles were working, one was a surgeon in East Africa and the other two were in India, one became Governor of Madras and the other chief engineer of Punjab. He was influenced by his father’s brother, Roland, who was a surgeon working at Kenya. The secon

Burkitt and O’Conor published combined data on clinical and epidemiological profile of Burkitt lymphoma in 1961. But the etiology was still a million dollar question. In this post, I will take you through the journey of discovering the etiology of Burkitt lymphoma (BL). Based on geographical distribution, the temperature patterns and frequent rainfall in the lymphoma belt, the possibility of a mosquito borne virus as a potential etiology was suggested. Taking you through the journey which happened in Africa... During this time, Burkitt was invited to give a lecture titled   ‘The Commonest Children’s Cancer in Tropical Africa, a hitherto unrecognised syndrome’ in Middlesex Hospital, London, 22 March 1961. After his return from London, he planned to go on a trip to explore the lymphoma belt and define it more precisely. When he was just wondering how to fund the trip, Sir Harold Himsworth, Director of Medical Research Council in London, came to visit Kampala, and funde

Burkitt lymphoma (BL),  known by the name of the surgeon Dennis Burkitt, who described it in 1958 in children in Uganda was initially described   by him as “sarcoma of the jaw of African children”. Some questions which came to my mind and might be to others also reading about Burkitt.. Was Burkitt the first person to report this tumour?  Or was it already documented?  It was already documented years before Burkitt reported it. The first documentation of the jaw tumours in children in Uganda was given by Albert Cook, a famous Ugandan medical pioneer who established the first hospital in Kampala, Mengo Hospital in 1897.   In the next five to six decades, there were reports by Edington and Thijs about maxillary lymphosarcomas in young children, reticulum cell sarcomas   and atypical round cell sarcomas of the jaw from Gold Coast and the Belgian Congo.Though there were many individual reports on jaw tumours in children, but the first detailed description was published by De