Lab guards against unseen threats

Petaluma man standing between us and 1,000 diseases|

The current Ebola epidemic in West Africa may have the public worried, but for Michael Ferris, director of Sonoma County’s Public Health Laboratory for the past five years, deadly viruses are all in a day’s work.

“I left paranoia behind a long time ago,” he laughs at the outset of a visit to the nondescript office building across from the old Sutter Hospital on Chanate Road in Santa Rosa. Inside those walls are found some of the most devastating diseases known to humanity: tuberculosis, syphilis, pertussis, norovirus, rabies and anthrax, to name a few.

The robust, smiling Petaluman has been director of the Public Health Laboratory for the past five years, after a quarter-century as a “bench-level microbiologist.” He’s also responsible for the area’s Laboratory Response Network, or LRN, at the front line of defense against bioterrorism. So he’s hardly unconcerned about the threat of epidemic, or disease of any kind. Just prepared.

Usually, the public health functions of the lab are fairly straightforward – testing dairies for pathogens in the milk products they put on the market, checking oysters from coastal waters to make sure they’re free of the toxins that sometimes naturally occur, assessing the beaches from Mendocino to Marin for E. coli and other health hazards. They also check the water quality from well systems, like the ones many rural Petaluma residents use.

The lab also keeps tabs on diseases to make sure they don’t become a hazard to the wider community. For instance, even though most strains of the salmonella bacteria are naturally occurring and respond to the same treatment, if there’s a cluster of a specific “serotype” then there’s probably a common source of origin, or a “point-source outbreak,” as Ferris calls it. “It’s probably food-related. Then we work with the public health nursing side to try and locate it.”

Still, it’s usually not food poisoning or bad oysters that grab the headlines these days. If it’s not Ebola, it’s the threat of bioterrorism. Since 1998, the county lab has been part of the national LRN, at the front line of defense against bioterrorism. “We assist law enforcement from federal down to local in so-called ‘white powder’ incidents, to rule out any kind of biological threat,” Ferris said.

The LRN is a network of about 150 labs nationwide, of which Sonoma County’s is one of only three in the Bay Area.

That would include threats like anthrax, which had a spate of popularity immediately following 9/11, or ricin, a poison that was mailed to a variety of political officials last year, including President Barack Obama. These highly dangerous and restricted agents can be used by common criminals or international terrorists to inflict not only suffering, but fear on a wide scale.

Not that it happens very often – the FBI has only called on the Sonoma lab “two or three times over the years,” said Ferris, after white powder was found in threatening letters. Still, the FBI frequently holds drills of the procedures and practices for such threats, keeping the lab on its toes.

In the center of the Public Health Laboratory complex where Ferris and a small staff of eight work, amid a warren of small offices converted to microscopic analysis and genotyping spectography, is a sealed hygienic lab like you’ve seen in the movies. During a recent visit, staff microbiologist Lisa Critchett breezed through in the regulation white gown, sterile gloves and booties and air-purifying head cover before she enters the lab. She reached into a double-doored airlock where samples have been left for testing in the sterile atmosphere of the lab, and takes them to a workbench for study.

The lab is Bio Safety Level 3, only one step down from BSL 4, where everyone must wear the spacesuit-like positive pressure personnel suit, for work with dangerous and exotic agents that pose a high individual risk of airborne infections – usually hemorrhagic fevers like Ebola. You’ve likely seen this in movies like “Outbreak” and “Contagion.” There are only a handful of such labs in the US, though several more are under construction.

Ferris, however, brushes aside the risk of Ebola. Instead he’s concerned about much more prevalent, and easily preventable, diseases like whooping cough. “The only thing that’s alarming, and it gets very political, is the vaccine rates in our area are pretty low,” he said. “Things like measles and whooping cough are largely preventable by vaccine, and to see these diseases come back with the numbers that we’re seeing is a bit troubling.”

County Deputy Health Director Karen Holbrook shares Ferris’ concern, though she points out that pertussis is cyclical, and this year’s numbers are at the high end of the cycle – with 666 cases so far this year, the highest rate of any county in the state. She also points out that high awareness and diagnosis also drives up the numbers. “Our clinicians are doing a great job at diagnosing cases,” she said.

For Ferris, the statistics of disease are all in a day’s work. “There’s a routine aspect to it, but there’s also an aspect of the unknown, where on any given day you don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said.

“It sounds horrible, but when there’s an outbreak going on, it’s kind of exciting.”

(Contact Christian Kallen at argus@arguscourier.com)

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