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Scabies

Published on February 28, 2023   43 min

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Other Talks in the Series: Neglected Tropical Diseases

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0:00
This episode of HS talks is on scabies. My name is Professor Andrew Steer of the Murdoch Children's Research Institute, the University of Melbourne and the Royal Children's Hospital Melbourne in Australia.
0:14
As an overview of my presentation, I'll be tackling 13 different areas and we'll move through those during the course of the presentation.
0:24
Scabies is an ancient disease, it was first apparently described in 1687 by two Italian physicians, and one of them, Giovan Cosimo Bonomo, described scabies as this. "I quickly found an itchy person and asking him where he felt the greatest and most acute itching, he pointed to a great many little pustules not yet scabbed over, of which picking out one with a very fine needle and squeezing it from a thin water, I took out a very small white globule scarcely discernible. Observing this with a microscope, I found it to be a very minute living creature, in shape resembling a tortoise of whitish color, a little dark upon the back with some thin and long hairs, of nimble motion with 6 feet, a sharp head with two little horns at the end of the snout", and thus scabies was first described.
1:18
Scabies biology, sacroptes scabiei var hominis, a variety hominis is the cause of human scabies. There are other varieties of scabies that do cause disease in animals other than humans. But today, we're going to be focusing on the hominis. The mites is microscopics, you cannot see it with the naked eye. Females are around 0.3 to 0.4 millimeter long and 0.25 to 0.35 millimeters wide. Males a smaller, less than half the size of the female.

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