THE ASAHI SHIMBUN
June 11, 2020 at 18:47 JST
Tomisaku Kawasaki, chief director of the nonprofit organization Japan Kawasaki Disease Research Center (Asahi Shimbun file photo)
Pediatrician Tomisaku Kawasaki, famed for discovering the inflammatory syndrome of an unknown cause in young children later named after him, died June 5 of old age in a Tokyo hospital. He was 95.
Kawasaki disease returned to the spotlight in 2020 in connection with the novel coronavirus after a number of Western countries reported that children infected with COVID-19 had developed symptoms similar to it.
Kawasaki was born in 1925 in Tokyo’s Asakusa district. In 1961, he encountered a disease in which children were running a high fever for an extended period and their eyes and lips turned red. When the fever waned, the skin of patient's fingertips would peel off.
In 1967, Kawasaki published a paper on the symptoms of 50 patients with the illness in the medical journal Arerugi.
The disease was named “Acute febrile muco-cutaneous lymph node syndrome (MCLS) in young children,” but is commonly called “Kawasaki disease” around the globe.
Some 15,000 people develop the disease every year in Japan, the cause of which remains unknown. Patients with severe symptoms may experience myocardial infarction and suffer permanent damage to their hearts.
In the 1970s, Kawasaki headed a health ministry research team to investigate the cause of the disease and develop a treatment for it.
In his later years, he served as chief director of the nonprofit organization Japan Kawasaki Disease Research Center and provided telephone consultations for patients.
The pediatrician was awarded numerous prizes in medicine over his lengthy career, including the Asahi Prize in 1989, the Japan Academy Prize in 1991 and the first Japan Pediatric Society Prize in 2006.
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