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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.
