June Almeida with her electron microscope at the Ontario Cancer Institute in Toronto in 1963
The woman who discovered the first human coronavirus was the daughter of a Scottish bus driver, who left school at 16.
June Almeida went on to become a pioneer of virus imaging, whose work has come roaring
back into focus during the present pandemic.
Covid-19 is a new illness but it is caused by a coronavirus of the type first identified by Dr Almeida in 1964 at her laboratory in St Thomas's Hospital in London.
The virologist was born June Hart in 1930 and grew up in a tenement near Alexandra Park in the north east of Glasgow.
She left school with little formal education but got a job as a laboratory technician in histopathology at Glasgow Royal Infirmary.
Later she moved to London to further her career and in 1954 married Enriques Almeida, a Venezuelan artist.
The couple and their young daughter moved to Toronto in Canada and, according to medical writer George Winter, it was at the [...]
What is Coronavirus? Coronaviruses are a group of viruses that cause diseases in mammals and birds. In humans, coronaviruses cause respiratory tract infections that are typically mild, such as the common cold, though rarer forms such as SARS, MERS, and COVID-19 can be lethal. Symptoms vary in other species: in chickens
they cause an upper respiratory tract disease, while in cows and pigs they cause diarrhea. There are yet to be vaccines or antiviral drugs to prevent or treat human coronavirus infections.
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