CME INDIA Presentation by ⚜ Dr. M. Gowri Sankar, MD, Senior Assistant Professor, Dept. of General Medicine, Government Medical College and ESI Hospital, Coimbatore.
Today’s History Feature:
Dr. Minoru Shirota
(Apr 23,1899 – Mar 10,1982)
💠Japanese Microbiologist
His contributions…
🔸Shirota was born and raised in Western Nagano, Japan.
🔸In the early 20th century, Japan was not prosperous and people were dying especially children due to infectious diseases, cholera, dysentery and malnutrition.
🔸That terrible situation of his country made him to study medicine and he committed himself to find a drug to prevent the spread of those diseases.
🔸He studied medicine at Medical school of Kyoto University in 1921. He then completed his Ph.D. in Medicine and joined as the faculty of medicine at Kyoto University.
🔸Dr. Shirota strongly believed that “Prevention is better than cure.”
🔸Hence, he focussed his research on microorganism and after long years of research, he isolated a strain Lactobacillus in 1930.
🔸Further, he was the first in the world to successfully culture the Lactobacillus bacterium and named it Lactobacillus casei Shirota strain.
🔸The name reveals that…
🔅 Lactobacillus casei is a small rod-shaped microorganism first discovered in cheese (widely available in cheese)
🔅 “Strain Shirota” is a strain isolated & named by Dr. Shirota.
🔸Also, he believed that lactobacillus would support in improving the functioning of the digestive system and helps to build immunity. Therefore, he used that strain and developed the Yakult in 1935.
🔸Basically, Yakult is a delicious probiotic drink, which contains billions of lactobacillus to promote the balance of intestinal flora.
🔸Initiallty, Yakult was marketed in Japan and thereby Japan became the global leader in probiotic drink with global tagline of “The Kiss of Good Health.”
🔸Moreover, Lactobacillus casei is widely used along with other probiotics in treating acute and infectious diarrhea as well as used in preventing antibiotic-associated diarrhea and Clostridium difficile infections.
A Day to Commemorate….
The Founding Father of Probiotics
The Promoter of Preventive Medicine
Dr. Minoru Shirota 🙏🏼
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