What Are Promising Approaches to Emerging Infectious Disease Detection?
More Programs and Publications Featuring Dr. Rodney Rohde
In this program:
How can emerging infectious diseases be detected in new ways? Medical laboratory scientist Dr. Rodney Rohde discusses his background in molecular diagnostics, new and promising approaches in infectious disease detection, and how to ensure that steady technology development continues.
Transcript
Interviewer:
So, Dr. Rohde, how can we better understand the world of wildlife and zoonotic viruses and the What are some of the most promising approaches to early detection surveillance of emerging infectious diseases?
Dr. Rodney Rohde:
Yeah, as a molecular epidemiologist and former public health professional, I spent a decade at the Department of Health in Texas, in Austin, in the first 10 years of my career, right out of my master's degree and had an amazing 10-year span where I worked with CDC and got to do on the ground efforts with rabies, with hantavirus, with plague. But I also was in the laboratory. So it was a really creative position that allowed me almost a 50 percent in each area, just I can't say enough about how wonderful it was to work in that area, but what I would mention about this is how critical, again, and a lot of this was developed back in the '90s, and it's been going rapidly ever since. And that's really the introduction of molecular diagnostics. That's one key point. So whether you're talking genomics or proteomics, the use of next generation sequencing, the use of what we're doing right now with wastewater surveillance, what an amazing tool to see at least a kind of watching the background noise of what's a normal viral RNA load say in the water of a city's hotels or an airport, for example, versus what might be considered a spike.
What's going on with COVID, with SARS-CoV RNA in a particular city? Can we get some early detection? Or can we get some early surveillance of what might be happening in those cities before it starts a major epidemic? So I think those are really critical going forward are molecular tools, and then the other is kind of old school bootstrap epidemiology. We need to consider how important it is for funding and awareness at the middle school, high school, and early college level, for epidemiology majors, for medical and science majors, for public health majors. Because what we're seeing in the past five years is COVID has really burnt out some of those professionals as well as some people just leaving the field for retiring reasons or pay and things like that. And I can't tell you how important it is to not let that happen because human beings with that expertise are as important as the tools that we utilize in the departments, in the laboratories and so forth.
And then innovation. So going forward, whether it's looking at wastewater surveillance, whether it's doing air quality, actually testing the air through cleaner Airvac systems and kind of trying to get as soon as possible as real time, if not sooner, of what's in the air, what's in the water, what's coming through the food, and also ongoing surveillance of animals, vectors like mosquitoes and ticks. We do this...we did this at the Department of Health in Austin where you trap mosquitoes, you trap ticks, these are all kinds of in the wildlife/laboratory area. It's really fascinating work. I love doing this. And so you start getting a feel for prevalence and incidents. For example, in the mosquito population in Houston, Texas, is West Nile virus circulating in mosquitoes or is Zika circulating in mosquitoes? And once you know that, that's part of the animal health part. Once you know something's going on, then you can start thinking about, well, what do we do if it bleeds or jumps into the human population?
Or what happens if this is an environmental issue? It's in the air or the water. And so again, funding people and ongoing development of those technologies and professional expertise is going to be critical and really can't be let down. We have to sustain that at the national and federal and state level because, as you guys know, you can't train up a microbiologist or a virologist overnight or an epidemiologist or even a physician or a nurse. It takes time. And when you lose that expertise, you don't just plug in a new person, it can be a problem. So we really need to keep that pipeline steady and full at all times.
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