tarassovi



History of serovar:

(Previously named mitis, than hyos, with reference strain Mitis Johnson)

The strain named Mitis Johnson was isolated in Australia from the blood of a sick man (oxdriver) and described as a new serovar named mitis (Johnson, 1942).

Pre~viously, however Mino (1938) had used the serovar name mitis to designate strains of leptospires isolated in Nothern Italy, which Gispen and Schffner (1939) identified as L. batavaiae. The name mitis teherefore was rejected for both the Australian and the Italian strains.

Savino and Renella (1944) isolated from man and pigs in Argentina leptospiral strains which they believed to constitute a new serovar for which they proposed the name hyos. Babudieri (1951) found hyos to be serologically identical with the strain Mitis Johnson. The name hyos was therefore considered to be the oldest legitimate epithet for the new serovar represented by that strain (Broom, 1952).

In 1938 Tarassov isolated, in the Primoria reion of the Soviet Union, a strain from a patient named Perepelitsin. The clinical picture symptoms and signs of this infection was described by Terskikh et al. (1941). AFter the death of Tarassov the strain was studied by Kiktenko and Ananyin (1941), who found in to be different from other strains and designated it as L. DV-A. No strain name is menmtioned in this publication. Varfolomeyeva compared the strain by cross-absorption tests with strain Mitis Johnson and suggested the serovar name tarassovi (1958).

DV-A is an abberivation of "Dalnyj Vostok" (=Far East). As the use of abbreviations are not in accordance with Rule 14 of the Code, the TSC decided at the Moscow meeting (1966) to adopt the serovar name tarassovi. This name appeared already in the serovar list of 1967 (WHO, 1967) with Perepelicin as name of the reference strain. Because this strain was for many years not available to most laboratories it was decided, as an exeption, to allow both strains, Perepelicin and Mitis Johnson, to act as refeerence strains until 1982, when alone Perepelicin was recognized as the reference strain of serovar tarassovi.

Since Perepelicin is an incorrect transcription of the in Russian written name of the patient, its correct transcription Perepelitsin is now introduced as strain name and used as such in theattached updated list of serovars.


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