In 1915,
Leptospica icterohaemorrhagiae was discovered and identified as the causative organism of Weil's disease by Inada and Ido. Ido and his colleagues who, in 1917, studied the condition of a disease known as
Nanukayami (Seven-days' fever), succeeded in finding out in patient of the disease a species of
leptospira serologically different from
L. icterohaemorrhagiae, and named it
L. hebdomadis in the next year.
Subsequently, the research in this field received increased attention and various strains of
leptospiras have since been isolated from humans and animals all over the world.
L. canicola was first isolated from dogs by Klarenbeek and Schüffner (1931), and from humans by Schüffner and his coworkers (1935) . More than 400 cases of human infection with
L. canicola are now recorded in the world medical literature.
Canine leptospirosis is distributed all the world over and cases of the disease have been reported from all countries. It is due to the canicola strain in a large majority of cases.
In our country,
L. canicola was isolated from dogs by Yamamoto (1940), Kitaoka (1940) and ourselves (1952) . Transmission of this disease from dogs to humans has been suspected, but no actual ease to justify the suspicion has yet been reported to our knowledge. It was while studying chemotherapy for
leptospirosis icterohaemorrhagica that we found the first human infection with
leptospira cinicola in 1950. The cases met with afterwards were one in 1951 and 46—3 sporadic and others epidemic—in 1952. As the epidemic cases were discribed in our previous report, 5 sporadic cases will be dealt with in this report.
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