Tomisaku Kawasaki, doctor who identified inflammatory disease in children, dies at 95

Tomisaku Kawasaki, a Japanese pediatrician who first identified an inflammatory children’s disease that now bears his name and is sometimes linked to long-term heart problems, died June 5 at a Tokyo hospital. He was 95.

The Japan Kawasaki Disease Research Center announced his death but did not cite a cause.

The disease was all but unknown before Dr. Kawasaki identified 50 cases, which he observed in the 1960s at his pediatric practice in Tokyo.

The disease has re-entered public consciousness during the coronavirus pandemic, because some young covid19 patients have displayed symptoms similar to those seen in Kawasaki disease. Two studies published in recent days by the Journal of the American Medical Association have discounted any connection and suggest that the conditions related to COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, are a distinct syndrome.

Nonetheless, Kawasaki disease remains a serious disorder and is marked by sometimes frightening symptoms, including high fevers, body rashes, bloodshot eyes and bright red lips. The tongue will turn the color of a strawberry, and the skin will often peel, starting from the fingertips and toes. The symptoms often come without warning, primarily attacking children under the age of 5.

Kawasaki first observed the disease in a young patient in 1961. Because it did not respond to penicillin or other standard treatments, he ruled out other illnesses such as juvenile rheumatoid arthritis.

“I could make no diagnosis of this unusual sickness for which I could find no reference in any medical literature,” he told the Japan Times in 2007. “Then I saw the second case, and over the next six years saw 50 more.”

He wrote a report, including his own drawings of various patients’ rashes and other symptoms, and published his research paper in 1967 in Japan.