Jacoba G. Kapsenberg (Groningen, 27 August 1924 - De Bilt, 12 March 2024)Announcement of death, NRC was a Dutch virologist who worked at the National Laboratory of Public Health, Utrecht, the Netherlands, from 1954 until 1989. There, she was responsible for viral diagnostics and developing the laboratory to the level of a national reference laboratory.Doornum, Gerard 2020. p.124
Career
In 1954, as a student of H.S. Frenkel,Doornum, Gerard 2020. p.147 Kapsenberg published a new method to obtain a vaccine against smallpox virus in explanted fetal cow and sheep skin tissue in a liquid medium.Doornum, Gerard 2020. p.185 The following year she completed her thesis, "Cultivation of vaccinia-virus in tissue explants", from the University of Amsterdam.(September 1961) Bibliography on Vaccinia, Variola, and Animal Pox Supplement (1956-1960). U.S. Army Chemical Corps Biological Laboratories, Fort Detrick, Maryland She joined the Laboratory for Virology in 1956 and over subsequent years, developed it to the level of a national reference laboratory.
She identified some of the early cases of monkeypox in captive monkeys in the mid 1960s. In 1966, with Rijk Gispen, she detected monkeypox in healthy laboratory monkeys, but later revealed this was probably a result of contamination from monkeypox virus isolated in the same laboratory that tested samples from cases at an outbreak at Rotterdam Zoo. Between 1970 and 1986 rates of fatalities from monkeypox in Zaire, were worrying, but studies at the time observed that the virus was not easily transmissible between people, and Kapsenberg's studies concluded that the monkeypox virus could not spontaneously mutate into smallpox.
She was part of the group that first identified Human adenovirus 41 in children with diarrhoea in 1983.
Personal and family Kapsenberg was affectionately known as Cootje.Doornum, Gerard 2020. p.132 Her father was G. Kapsenberg from Groningen.Doornum, Gerard 2020. pp. 158-159
Selected publications
References
Bibliography
Further reading
External links