Fighting plague: On the hunt for killer viruses

Nathan Wolfe, UCLA biologist and NIH Health Pioneer awardee, has the most unusual way of studying viral plague-harbingers.

He goes hunting, deep in the African jungles of Cameroon, Yaound.

The Doctor, as villagers call him, investigates sudden die-offs of primates in the jungles, collects blood from hunters and their kills, tests wild and domestic birds for avian flu and a vast range of fiel research all in the quest to discover viruses originating in the wild with the potential to mutate into pandemic forms.

Animal-to-human invaders or zoonoses – malaria, HIV, smallpox, West Nile, Ebola, SARS, avian influenza – have plagued recent centuries with devastating consequences, and yet very little has been understood about the way they enter and spread among humans or the range of potential carriers in the animals kingdom.

Wolfe, and an increasing number of biologists and epidemiologists have begun going after these killer viruses more intensely in the last few decades. With promising results.

Three years ago, Wolfe and his team discovered primate retroviruses in the blood of three African hunters. Until his findings, nobody had demonstrated that retroviruses could cross directly from jungle primates to indigenous hunters. He believes that viruses are constantly spilling over from animals to humans all the time, and his vision is to look for viruses that are emerging this way.

“Imagine how different the AIDS epidemic might have been if we’d had three to five years of advance warning. I’ve been convinced for a long time that we need to challenge the old model of the ‘fire brigade response’ to pandemics. We need a new disease forecasting model that could help us prevent them, not just respond to them.”

Read more of Nathan Wolfe and his work at both Wired and Stanford magazines.

[sources: stanfordmagazine; wired; image]

Tags: killer viruses, plagues, Nathan Wolfe, bushmeat hunters