The association between human disease and sick parrots was first recognized in Europe in 1879. J.Ritter is credited with being the first to document a case of parrot fever in 1879.
A team of researchers including J.W Moulder and A. Matsumoto used C.psittaci to understand chlamydia. In fact, the first high-resolution images of a chlamydia bacteria were of C.psittaci in 1970.
In 1978, Wyrick and Brownridge demonstrated how chlamydia infects immune cells.
The word “psittacosis” comes from the Greek term “psittakos,” which means parrot, as the illness was initially discovered in parrots. The term was coined in 1895.
Over the years, however, it became evident that a wide range of bird species, both wild and domestic, could be reservoirs for the bacterium Chlamydia psittaci.
A thorough study of psittacosis was not conducted until the outbreaks of 1929-1930, which occurred across four continents. Even if the number of cases weren’t so high, there was widespread fear about the disease at the time. So much so, that in January 1930, US President Herbert Hoover banned all import of parrots into the United States.
The fear among the general public was not entirely unfounded. After all, while penicillin was first discovered in 1928, it was approved for clinical use only in 1943. Tetracyclines, the preferred treatment for psittacosis, was only introduced in 1948. Doxycycline, another antibiotic used to treat psittacosis (ornithosis) was introduced in 1967.