Pasteur had found that rabies was caused by a virus – a disease-causing agent so small it could not be seen, even under a microscope. He had already worked out a way to defeat the rabies virus in animals. But he had never tried his treatment on humans. Pasteur treated Joseph, and Joseph became the first person to be cured of rabies.zation
In the 1800s, the bite of a dog with rabies meant certain death for the person who had been bitten. In 1885, when a rabid dog bit a boy called Joseph Meister, his mother was desperate. She went to the only man she thought might be able to cure her son.
Pasteur devoted his life to solving the problems of industry, farming, and medicine. He discovered that if a liquid like milk is heated to a certain temperature for a few minutes, it takes longer to spoil. If milk is not treated in this way, tiny living organisms called “bacteria’ cause it to go bad. These organisms are killed by heat in a process that came to be called “pasteurization’.
Pasteur also discovered that many diseases are caused by germs that enter the body from outside. In 1877 he tried to find a cure for anthrax, a disease that affects the lungs and kills cattle and sheep. Pasteur successfully developed the method known as ‘immunization’.
Immunization means giving a patient a weak dose of a virus that the patient can fight off. Then the patient’s body knows how to stop an actual case of the disease.
DID YOU KNOW:- In 1868 Pasteur saved the French silk industry. Silk businesses were facing ruin because of a mysterious disease that attacked the silkworms. Pasteur worked out a way of detecting the disease and preventing it from spreading.
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