Foreword to the Special Issue

Abstract

[first paragraph of article]

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the description of the publication in Japanese of Dr. Kawasaki’s landmark series of 50 children suffering from the condition that would later bear his name (Kawasaki, 1967). The fact that Kawasaki felt the need to gather 50 subjects before publication attests to the uphill battle that he waged in getting the medical establishment in Japan to recognize that he was describing a new clinical entity (Burns et al., 2000). Kawasaki had no knowledge of the potentially dire consequences of the condition that he described, as it was not until 1970, when the Japanese Ministry of Health conducted a questionnaire survey of Japan, that the 10 deaths from acute myocardial infarction were discovered. By the time of his seminal publication in English in 1974, the complications of coronary artery vasculitis and aneurysm formation were clearly linked to the clinical illness (Kawasaki et al., 1974).