Introduction:
It is a bacterial infection that can be dangerous. You can catch it from an infected person. The infection spreads when he or she coughs or sneezes. Diphtheria often causes a bad sore throat and swollen glands. It can also cause a fever and chills. Diptheria creates a toxin in the body if it is not treated. A toxin is a poison made by cells. This can cause serious healthproblems. This program explains what diphtheria is and what causes it. It also talks about the diagnosis and treatment of diphtheria

Definition:
It is highly contagious bacterial disease causing inflammation of the mucous membranes, formation of a false membrane in the throat which hinders breathing and swallowing, and potentially fatal heart and nerve damage by a …show more content…
In 1883, Edwin Klebs identified the bacterium and named it Klebs-Loeffler bacterium. The club shape of bacterium helped Edwin to differentiate it from other bacteria.
Friedrich Loeffler was the first one to cultivate Corynebacterium diphtheriae in 1884. He showed that the bacillus produces an exotoxin.
In 1888, Emile Roux and Alexandre Yersin showed that a substance produced by C. diphtheriae caused symptoms of diphtheria in animals.
In 1895, H. K. Mulford Company of Philadelphia started production and testing of diphtheria antitoxin in the United States. Park and Biggs described the method for producing serum from horses for use in diphtheria treatment.
On January 7, 1904, Ruth Cleveland died of diphtheria at the age of twelve years in
Princeton, New Jersey. Ruth was the eldest daughter of former president Grover Cleveland and the former first lady Frances Folsom. She was the only one of the Clevelands' five children who died before adulthood.
In the 1920s, there were an estimated 100,000 to 200,000 cases of diphtheria per year in