This led to the disease being known as "Asturian leprosy", and it is recognized as the first modern pathological description of a syndrome. It was an endemic disease in northern Italy, where it was named, from Lombard, as "pell agra" (agra = holly-like or serum-like; pell = skin) by Francesco Frapolli of Milan. With pellagra affecting over 100,000 people in Italy by the 1880s, debates raged as to how to classify the disease (as a form of scurvy, elephantiasis or as something new), and over its causation. In the 19th century, Roussel started a campaign in France to restrict consumption of maize and eradicated the disease in France, but it remained endemic in many rural areas of Europe. Because pellagra outbreaks occurred in regions where maize was a dominant food crop, the most convincing hypothesis during the late 19thcentury, as espoused by Cesare Lombroso, was that the maize either carried a toxic substance or was a carrier of disease. Louis Sambon, an Anglo-Italian doctor working at the London School of Tropical Medicine, was convinced that pellagra was carried by an insect, along the lines of malaria. Later, the lack of pellagra outbreaks in Mesoamerica, where maize is a major food crop, led researchers to investigate processing techniques in that region. Pellagra was studied mostly in Europe until the late 19th century when it became epidemic especially in the southern United States. In the early 1900s, pellagra reached epidemic proportions in the American South.
It also incorporates itself into viral DNA, hence inhibiting viral DNA synthesis during reproduction.It possesses in vitro activity against the following viruses:
Human herpesviruses
Adenoviruses
Human poxviruses (including the smallpox virus)
Human papillomavirus

History
Cidofovir was discovered at the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry, Prague, by Antonín Holý, and developed by Gilead Sciences and is marketed with the brand name Vistide by Gilead in the US, and by Pfizer elsewhere. Synthesis
Cidofovir can be synthesized from a pyrimidone derivative and a protected derivative of glycidol. See also
Brincidofovir, a novel prodrug of cidofovir that can be taken orally


== References ==