Jean Hissette, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death
TweetJean Hissette
First to discover African River Blindness
Date of Birth: 
Place of Birth: Leuven, Flemish Region, Belgium
About Jean Hissette
- Jean Hissette (30 August 1888 – 26 August 1965) was a Belgian ophthalmologist. Hissette was born in Leuven.
- In 1930, he became the first to discover African River Blindness, a severe eye disease occurring in people affected by onchocerciasis, a filarial worm infection.
- Onchocerciasis had already been known for a long time, but until 1930 no other specialist in tropical diseases had ever identified severely afflicted blind people anywhere in Africa.
- Hissette discovered several thousand victims along the Sankuru river in Belgian Congo, and so became the first one to identify this strain of the disease.
Read more at Wikipedia