History discovery of Giardia spp

Giardia was initially described by van Leeuwenhoek in 1681 as he was examining his own diarrheal stools under the microscope. In his watery excrement van Leeuwenhoek discovered ‘… small animalcules a moving very prettily; some of ‘em a bit bigger, others a bit less, than a blood globule, but all of one and the same make, …’ which Dobell in 1932 concluded were the vegetative (trophozoite) stage of the infection.

Clifford Dobell, one of the most gifted and skilled protozoologists, who died in 1949. Dobell was able to maintain parasitic intestinal protozoa in pure culture in his laboratory.

The organism was described in greater detail by Vilem Dusan Lambl, a Czech physician in 1859, who thought the organism belonged to the genus Cercomonas and named it Cercomonas intestinalis. Despite his significant contribution, Lambl did not link the diarrheal disease with the giardia parasite, but rather erroneously assumed that the organism is part of the normal, harmless flora of the intestines.

Thereafter, some have named the genus after him while others have named the species of the human form after him (i.e., G. lamblia). In 1879, Grassi named a rodent organism now known to be a Giardia species, Dimorphus muris, apparently unaware of Lambl’s earlier description.

The term Lamblia intestinalis was coined in 1888 by Raphael Anatole Émile Blanchard which Stiles then changed to G. duodenalis in 1902. Subsequently, Kofoid and Christiansen proposed the names G. lamblia in 1915 and G. enterica in 1920.

In 1915, Charles Wardell Stiles (1867-1941) an American Parasitologist, introduced the name Giardia lamblia to commemorate the work done by Professor A. Giard in Paris and Dr. Lambl in Prague. Charles Wardell Stiles also suspected a link between giardia and diarrhea for the first time.
History discovery of Giardia spp