Jacoba G. Kapsenberg

Jacoba G. Kapsenberg (Groningen, 27 August 1924 - De Bilt, 12 March 2024)[1] was a Dutch virologist who worked at the National Laboratory of Public Health, Utrecht, the Netherlands, from 1954 until 1989.

Frenkel,[3] Kapsenberg published a new method to obtain a vaccine against smallpox virus in explanted fetal cow and sheep skin tissue in a liquid medium.

[4] The following year she completed her thesis,[3] "Cultivation of vaccinia-virus in tissue explants", from the University of Amsterdam.

[7] In 1966, with Rijk Gispen, she detected monkeypox in healthy laboratory monkeys, but later revealed this was probably a result of contamination from monkeypox virus isolated in the same laboratory that tested samples from cases at an outbreak at Rotterdam Zoo.

[8] Between 1970 and 1986 rates of fatalities from monkeypox in Zaire, were worrying, but studies at the time observed that the virus was not easily transmissible between people, and Kapsenberg's studies concluded that the monkeypox virus could not spontaneously mutate into smallpox.