Thomas Henry Flewett

Flewett was born in Shimla India, where his father, William Edward Flewett (born 1894 ) a graduate of Oxford University, was a member of the Imperial Forestry Service, that, in 1966, became the Indian Forest Service of the Indian Civil Service.

In 1915, his father joined the Indian Reserve Army, as required by law, becoming a Second Lieutenant in July 1916.

Thomas Henry Flewett, MD, FRCPath, FRCP (29 June 1922 – 12 December 2006) was a founder member (and subsequently Fellow) of the Royal College of Pathologists and was elected (by distinction) a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of London in 1978.

He was transferred to Lahore in 1924.

Thomas Flewett was educated at Campbell College in Belfast.

Flewett received his medical education at Queen's University, Belfast, where he graduated with honours at the end of the World War II in 1945.

Flewett studied medicine at Queen's University Belfast, where he graduated with honours in 1945.

He worked at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast and, from 1946 to 1948, was a demonstrator in bacteriology and pathology at Queen's University.

His scientific interest in viruses began with his membership of the scientific staff of the National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill, where he spent three years between 1948 and 1951 researching common cold viruses and exploring the effect of influenza viruses on cells in culture.

This led to his first use of electron microscopy, in which he became a leading authority.

In 1951 he married June Evelyn Hall who predeceased him.

He was survived by their two daughters, Janet Anne and Judy Elizabeth.

Another daughter, Pamela Margaret Jane, died in infancy.

In 1951 he moved as lecturer in bacteriology to Leeds University, where he was involved in the 1953 smallpox outbreak.

This experience proved invaluable twenty-five years later when a laboratory-associated case of smallpox at the Medical School of the University of Birmingham, UK, led to the death of Janet Parker.

In 1951 he married June Evelyn Hall who bore him three daughters.

In 1956 Flewett was appointed consultant virologist to East Birmingham Hospital (now Heartlands Hospital)

, where he established one of the first virus laboratories in England.

His laboratory was close to an infectious diseases unit and this enabled him to provide confirmation of the clinical diagnosis of diseases that included poliomyelitis, diarrhoea, smallpox and AIDS.

He was a member of the hospital's senior management team and helped to establish the regional immunology laboratory there.

Flewett's interests included influenza, coxsackie A and coxsackie B viruses, the major and minor variants of smallpox virus, and hepatitis B virus.

Although he discovered the cause of hand, foot and mouth disease, the work that gained him an international reputation began in the early 1970s with the discovery of viruses causing diarrhoea, particularly in infants and young children.

Flewett named one of the then most frequent causes of death in infants in tropical countries, rotaviruses.

Norwalk virus had been discovered by Albert Kapikian using immune electron microscopy and Ruth Bishop and colleagues had seen different particles that they thought were viruses in gut biopsies by thin section electron microscopy.

But the preparation of thin sections was too cumbersome for routine use, and Flewett and his co-workers showed that these viruses could be seen by electron microscopy directly in faeces.

Flewett and his colleagues in his Birmingham laboratory had observed these viruses in the faeces of sick children before the publication of Ruth Bishop's paper but they failed to realise that they were the cause of the infection.

The virus particles have a wheel-shaped appearance by electron microscopy, and it was Flewett who gave them the name "rotavirus," by which they have been known since.

The early research papers from the 1970s use both names.

Flewett did much collaborative work on rotaviruses with others to establish the varieties of rotavirus which infect the young of virtually every species of animal.

Flewett wrote: 'At the South Wiltshire Virology Society I met Gerald Woode, then at Compton, in late 1973.

He described a virus causing diarrhoea in calves.

I realized we had much the same in children.

We found his virus and ours were related – something new.

We called them rotaviruses'

His original idea was to suggest the name "urbivirus" because of the structural similarity of rotavirus to orbivirus.

Ruth Bishop, who was the first to describe rotaviruses as a cause of gastroenteritis had suggested "duovirus" because these viruses replicate in the duodenum and, at the time, were thought to have a double protein outer coat.

He was a member of the board of the Public Health Laboratory Service (now UK Health Security Agency) from 1977 to 1983 and was chairman of the Public Health Laboratory Service's Committee on Electron Microscopy from 1977 to 1987.

His laboratory in Birmingham was a World Health Organization Reference and Research Centre for Rotavirus Infections from 1980 until his retirement in 1987.

He was an external examiner, visiting lecturer, and scientific journal editor.

He was chairman of the World Health Organization (WHO) Steering Committee on Viral Diarrhoeal Diseases, 1990–3, and a member until 1996.