CONTRIBUTION OF PROFESSOR ALEXANDRU CIUCA (1880-1972) IN THE DIAGNOSIS AND ERADICATION OF ANIMAL DISEASES

Alexandru Ciuca studied between 1896 and 1901 at the School of Veterinary Medicine in Bucharest, where he stood out, before delivering his inaugural graduation thesis entitled "Trial serotherapy of the glanders". His scientific training was completed in France, from 1910 to 1914, while working under the direction of Pasteur disciples such as: Weinberg, Brumpt, Raillet. At the Pasteur Institute in Paris he worked with Roux and Mesnil. In Germany he worked in Berlin in 1914, under the personal supervision of Ostertag and Neuman from University of Bonn. He then worked in England between 1927 and 1928, in the field of FMD, at the Lister Institute in London UK, which included original research, which later became classic. The young Alexandru Ciuca had the subtle inspiration to be the first in the world to use the reaction of the complement fixation method (CFT - complement fixation test) for the purpose of differentiation in terms of these antigenic types of viruses and Sera collected from different groups of guinea pigs inoculated through experimental infection or repeated vaccination with the three antigenic types of known viruses. In 1928, Al. Ciuca succeeded to make the typization of foot and mouth disease virus by the reaction of complement fixation (Bordet and Gengou), data published in "The Journal of Hygiene", p. 325-338, in London, 08 March, 1929. He thus contributed to the identification of the foot and mouth disease virus serotype as well as to the development of corresponding measures for foot and mouth disease prophylaxis. In the report entitled "Development of veterinary science during the last 100 years and men that illustrated the progress in this field" (Le developpement de la Science Veterinaire au cours des dernieres cent annees, XVII Congres mondial veterinaire, Hannover, aout, 1963), Professor Alexandru Ciuca was included in the Group of 30 prestigious names (R. Vuillaume). After recalling that "In Romania, Alexandru Ciuca gave us a method of treatment in dourine, which effectively resulted in the elimination of this disease in the whole of Europe" the report shows that Professor Ciuca published in Bull. of Int. Epiz. No. 7, pp. 168-193, in 1933, a scientific paper entitled "The dourine", in which he presented the symptoms of the disease and the methods of reducing the incidence of dourine in horses in Romania through appropriate treatments with subtoxic doses of neosalvarsam, results cited and commented in the Treaty of infectious diseases of Rersa Manninger and Janos Mocsy, 1959.