Jean Hissette

Who was Jean Hissette?

Jean Hissette was a Belgian ophthalmologist.

Hissette was born in Leuven. In 1930, he became the first to discover African River Blindness, a severe eye disease occurring in people affected by onchocerciasis, a filarial worm infection. Onchocerciasis had already been known for a long time, but until 1930 no other specialist in tropical diseases had ever identified severely afflicted blind people anywhere in Africa. Hissette discovered several thousand victims along the Sankuru river in Belgian Congo, and so became the first one to identify this strain of the disease.