Oropharyngeal Tularemia in Children

Tularemia is a zoonotic disease found throughout most of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres [1]. In 1837, Homma Soken provided the first definition of human tularemia in Japan and described the illness as “hare meat poisoning.” McCoy and Chapin isolated and characterized the organism Bacterium tularense from naturally infected ground squirrels in 1912. Edward Francis later isolated Bacterium tularense from human blood and showed the connections between the Japanese disease and McCoy and Chapin’s findings in 1919 [2]. Much of the knowledge of the organism, modes of transmission, and clinical manifestations of disease originated from the work of Edward Francis. Hence, the causative agent was renamed as Francisella tularensis is honor.