Steffen Backert (editor) - Fighting Campylobacter Infections: Towards a One Health Approach

I feel very much honored to be contacted by Steffen Backert for providing a foreword for the Current Topics in Microbiology and Immunology (CTMI) book on Fighting Campylobacter Infections: Towards a One Health Approach that he has edited. After having worked in Campylobacter research area for several decades, I was very impressed by the extraordinary list of chapters and the great collection of internationally recognized experts who contributed to this volume. As a matter of fact, writing the foreword offered to me a perfect opportunity to study the whole book. Thus, I am very happy to write this in a very personal way.

In the long history of the Campylobacter research, the pathogenicity of these remarkable bacteria was gradually enlightened. In a first description more than 134 years ago, the German medical doctor and bacteriologist Theodor Escherich described Vibrio-like microbes in the colonic mucus of children (Escherich 1886), a study that was not recognized by the international community until 1985 (Kist 1986a). In these early days, Theodor Escherich was working as a pediatrician at a childrens hospital in Munich, where he had seen 72 infants with diarrhea (Cholera infantum) during the summer of 1885. Seventeen of them died from the disease, and in the postmortem examination, Theodor Escherich microscopically detected Vibrio-like microbes in the colonic mucosa of 15 infants. He was not able to grow the bacteria under laboratory conditions, but made drawings and described their morphology in detail. The drawings and description clearly fit with Campylobacter bacteria (Kist 1986a). About 45 years after this first report by Theodor Escherich, bacteria isolated from the intestines of sick calves and pigs were named Vibrio jejuni (Jones et al. 1931) and Vibrio coli (Doyle 1944), respectively. In addition, these bacteria were detected in ox bile blood-cultures as a Vibrio of bovine origin, when a gastroenteritis outbreak was investigated in a correctional institution of the USA (Levy 1946). Related Vibrio species were also discovered elsewhere in patients with diarrheal disease (King 1957). Later, these related Vibrio-like microbes, probably all corresponding to Campylobacter jejuni and Campylobacter coli as we know them today, were included in the new genus Campylobacter (Sebald and Vron 1963). Subsequently, firstly in 1968, Campylobacter spp. could be isolated and grown from human diarrheal stools (Cooper and Slee 1971; Dekeyser et al. 1972). The development of improved culturing methods in laboratories facilitated the successful isolation and growth of these bacteria from human stool samples, which was the prerequisite that