1972 CDC Team in Panguma Sierra Leone investigating outbreak of Lassa Fever. Carlos Campbell, Panguma Mission Hospital doctors, Verne Newhouse, Tom Monath, David Fraser and Graham Kemp
53 years ago I worked in Sierra Leone as a Peace Corps doctor. On my first trip around the country I visited a hospital in Panguma where there had been deaths from what appeared to be a serious infectious disease. I wrote a letter to the CDC simply addressed to head of infectious diseases. This was before Facetime or even being able to direct dial from Africa. I asked whether the deaths and symptoms were consistent with Lassa Fever. I had read an article in the New York Times about the disease in Liberia a few months before our departure for S.L.
A couple of months later in the fall of 1972 I was notified that the CDC had confirmed the disease and were sending a team to study it. The CDC team was there for a month, and studied the disease and how it spread. They discovered the vector the manner of exposure to the virus and advised the mission doctors on how avoid and control the spread of the infection.
Their experience was later used to study Hanta virus in the U.S. (a close relative of Lassa) and helped in figuring out how that disease was spread.
Today, if I sent the letter from Africa to the CDC,with a Trump appointee head of HHS who doubts the germ theory and a political appointee heading CDC, I doubt that it would be read.
Medicynical Note: America is unilaterally disarming. Under Trump our military is policing the streets of D.C. Our intelligence organizations have decapitated themselves with firings of experienced knowledgeable operatives and replacement with inept inexperienced politicos and real estate barons.
And with Kennedy at HHS we’re removing knowledgeable medical leadership and replacing them with political commissars. We are undermining effective preventive disease strategies, vaccinations, and replacing it with old wives tales, rumors, and treatments proven to be ineffective……….effectively nothing.
Medicynic 