History discovery of Giardia spp

Giardia was initially described by van Leeuwenhoek in 1681 as he was examining his own diarrheal stools under the microscope. In his watery excrement van Leeuwenhoek discovered ‘… small animalcules a moving very prettily; some of ‘em a bit bigger, others a bit less, than a blood globule, but all of one and the same make, …’ which Dobell in 1932 concluded were the vegetative (trophozoite) stage of the infection. Clifford Dobell, one of the most gifted and skilled protozoologists, who died in 1949