ABSTRACT
During the early 1930s, meat workers in Queensland, Australia, complained of an illness that produced symptoms unlike any of the known diseases of the area. The unknown nature of this new disease led to the illness initially being called query fever or Q fever, until more was known about the disease and a more suitable name was found. However, the name stuck and is still used today. The bacterium responsible for the disease was rst identied during 1935 in blood and urine collected from Australian patients. Two years later, a new rickettsial bacterium was isolated in Australia from the bandicoot tick (also called the slender opossum tick). At the same time but a world away, an unknown pathogen was isolated from Dermacentor andersoni ticks in Montana and named Nine Mile agent. These disparate events were linked when an unidentied doctor accidently pricked himself with a needle containing the pathogen from Montana and developed Q fever. This accident led to the discovery that the pathogen that caused Q fever in Australia, the rickettsial bacterium isolated from ticks in Australia, and the pathogen recovered in Montana were all the same; it was named Coxiella burnetii (McDade 1990).
