Her name was June Almeida. It was the first to identify the coronavirus family in a human. It happened in 1964 at St. Thomas Hospital in London. As the daughter of a Scottish bus driver, she dropped out of school at 16. She was a pioneer in virus image production, but her work was forgotten. So we're going to talk about her, the woman who discovered the first human corona virus.
He received little formal training. However, she got a job as a laboratory technician for histopathology at the Royal Infirmary in Glasgow. He later moved to London to advance his career. In 1954 she married the Venezuelan artist Enrique Almeida.
Introduced in Canada
They moved to Toronto, Canada. According to medical writer George Winter, she was outstanding at the Ontario Cancer Institute. Dr. surprised with an electron microscope Almeida her colleagues.
She was a pioneer in a way to better visualize viruses. He examined antibodies that were developed in animals or humans and that caused viruses to accumulate around them.
His talent was recognized in the UK. In 1964 she was recalled to work at the St. Thomas Hospital School of Medicine in London. It is the same hospital where current British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was treated when he suffered from Covid-19. Upon his return, he started with Dr. David Tyrrell working together. He headed the research unit for colds.
Winter reports that Dr. Tyrrell had examined voluntary nasal irrigation. His team discovered that they could get cultures from some viruses that have been linked to colds, but not all.
In particular, a sample came from a student at a boarding school in Surrey, southern Britain in 1960. They found that the sample could transmit the symptoms of the cold to volunteers. But they couldn't get a routine cell culture.
They sent the samples to June Almeida and the doctor could see the virus particles. Almeida described them as flu or influenza viruses, but not exactly the same. This made her the woman who discovered the first human corona virus.
The name "Coronavirus"
However, his first article with its results for a scientific journal was rejected. The referees said the pictures he produced were just bad pictures of flu virus particles. The new discovery of the B814 strain was in the British Medical Journal The first photos of what he had seen were published in the Journal of General Virology two years later.
It was Dr. Tyrrell and Dr. Almeida, who called the new particles "Coronavirus" because of the corona that surrounded them in the pictures. It is believed that about 20% of the common cold is caused by the coronavirus discovered by Tyrrell and Almeida. This is stated by Professor Hugh Pennington, Professor Emeritus of Bacteriology at the University of Aberdeen.
Almeida was also the first to receive pictures of the rubella virus British Medical Journal in his obituary. The woman later worked at the Graduate School of Medicine in London, where she received her doctorate. He ended his career at the Wellcome Institute in London.
June Almeida died in 2007 at the age of 77.
