Alexandre Yersin

Yersinia pestis is named in honor of Alexandre Yersin, a student of Louis Pasteur, who isolated plague in patients in Hong Kong in 1894.

Andrew Mendelson examines microbiologists Alexandre Yersin and Emile Roux.

This is the organisation that employed Dr Alexandre Yersin, who discovered the cause of plague in 1894 in Hong Kong.

Yersinia - named after French scientist Alexandre Yersin, who identified it over 100 years ago - causes bubonic plague, the killer disease transmitted by fleas living in the fur of rats.

It was not until 1894 that Alexandre Yersin and Kitasato Shibasaburo, independently in Hong Kong isolated the bacterium responsible for the Third Bubonic Plague Pandemic.