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KOMPAS.com – Covid-19 disease caused by the corona virus has infected more than 2 million people worldwide.
The coronavirus caused by Covid-19 itself is distinguished by the name SARS-CoV-2. While the coronavirus family is made up of several types, such as the one that causes SARS and MERS.
Well, someone who first discovered the coronavirus turned out to be a woman in 1964. The woman was June Almeida.
A pioneer in virus visualization.
Quoted from The bbcJune is the daughter of a Scottish bus driver. June dropped out of school at age 16.
Despite this, he became known as the pioneer of virus imaging, whose work has been refocused during the current pandemic.
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Covid-19 is a new disease but is caused by a new type of corona virus.
While the corona virus that was first identified by Dr. Almeida was discovered in 1964 in his laboratory at St Thomas Hospital in London.
The virologist was born in June Hart in 1930 and grew up in a house near Alexandra Park in northeast Glasgow.
He left school with little formal education, but landed a job as a histopathology laboratory technician at Glasgow Royal Infirmary.
Then she moved to London to continue her career and in 1954 she married Enriques Almeida, a Venezuelan artist.
Investigate the common cold
The couple and their young daughter moved to Toronto in Canada, and according to medical writer George Winter at the Ontario Cancer Institute, Dr. Almeida developed his extraordinary abilities with an electron microscope.
He pioneered methods that better visualize viruses by using antibodies to combine them.
His talent was recognized in England and he was persuaded in 1964 to work at St Thomas Hospital School of Medicine in London, the same hospital that treated Prime Minister Boris Johnson when he suffered from the Covid-19 virus.
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Upon his return, he began collaborating with Dr. David Tyrrell, who conducted research in a common flu unit at Salisbury in Wiltshire.
Dr. Tyrrell had previously studied samples of the flu virus that became known as B814, caused by washing a student’s nose at a boarding school in Surrey in 1960.
They found that they could transmit the symptoms of the common cold to the volunteers, but were unable to grow them in a routine cell culture.
However, voluntary research shows its growth in organ culture, and Dr. Tyrrell wonders if it can be seen with electron microscopy.
They sent samples to Juni Almeida, who saw virus particles in the samples, which he described as influenza viruses, but they were not exactly the same.
He identified what became known as the first human coronavirus.
Coronaviruses are a group of viruses that have the appearance of a halo or corona when viewed under a microscope.
Virus crowns when viewed under a microscope.Also read: Researchers discover 3 variants of the Corona virus that causes Covid-19, what are they?
The new discovery for the B814 strain was written in the British Medical Journal in 1965, and the first photographs of what it saw were published in the Journal of General Virology two years later.
Dr. Tyrrell and Dr. Almeida, along with Prof. Tony Waterson, the head of St. Thomas’s, called it coronavirus because of the corona or halos surrounding it in the virus image.
Dr. Almeida then worked at the London Graduate School of Medicine, where he earned a doctorate.
He completed his career at the Wellcome Institute, where he was nominated for various patents in the field of virus imaging.
After leaving Wellcome, Dr. Almeida became a yoga teacher, but returned to virology as an advisor in the late 1980s, when he helped take a new picture of the HIV virus.
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June Almeida died in 2007, at the age of 77.
Now, 13 years after his death, he has finally earned the recognition that he deserves to be a pioneer whose work accelerates understanding of the virus that is currently spreading worldwide.
