Julio Isidro Maiztegui

Julio Isidro Maiztegui (August 25, 1931 – August 29, 1993) was an Argentine physician and epidemiologist.

Life and work Maiztegui was born in Bahía Blanca, Argentina, in 1931. He received a medical degree from the University of Buenos Aires, in 1957, and the following year, began his residency at the Boston University Hospital. He specialized in the treatment of infectious disease and in 1964, received a master's degree in Public Health at Harvard. He entered the Clinical Research and Medical Education Center (CEMIC) in Buenos Aires (Argentina) in 1965 and went on to receive a Master of Epidemiology from the University of London, in 1969.

Returning to Argentina, he began research on Argentine hemorrhagic fever, a condition known among the country's rural population as the mal de los rastrojos ("the sickness of the corn straw").

Maiztegui's research led to a breakthrough in the treatment of the disease: in 1971, he devised the introduction of blood plasma from recovered patients in saline solution to those whose exposure had taken place under eight days earlier. The treatment, which reduced mortality rates from 30% to around 1% of those infected,