Divvying Up Diseases : 2 County Lab Workers Labor Long Hours to Process Huge Number of Specimens

In the county’s public health lab, behind a heavy, locked door barring the way to thousands of infectious disease specimens lurking within, the head microbiologist nursed a cold.

Though his throat was sore and his nose was clogged, Steve Matson refused to go home.

“You take a day or two off and you come back to 50 or 100 HIV and TB tests waiting for you in the refrigerator,” said the thin, balding 49-year-old lab director. “It’s a real nightmare because people are expecting their results and you have to deliver.”

Last year a record 35,000 tests from clinics and public health outlets throughout Ventura County were processed by Matson and one other microbiologist at the lab, tucked in a back room at Public Health Services across the street from the county hospital.

“Precarious is a good word,” former Public Health Officer Larry Dodds said of the small staff. “If one of them is out all of a sudden--gets a broken leg or gets hit by a car--they are going to be in real trouble.”

Sniffling quietly in a tiny office cluttered with Far Side comic strips and dog-eared lab reports, Matson recounted the origin of his distress, a budget reduction three years ago that cut his staff in half and trimmed his annual budget to its current $300,000.

Since then the volume of lab work has increased 25%, allowing Matson and his staff of three little relief. Working long hours under tight reporting deadlines, the public health lab screens for communicable diseases ranging from the human immunodeficiency virus and tuberculosis to gonorrhea and syphilis.

“We don’t take real vacations,” microbiologist Nick Maverakis said. “If you’re gone for a few days that means you come in on Saturday and Sunday to make up for it.”

To better manage the workload, Matson and Maverakis divvy up the diseases, each concentrating his efforts for maximum productivity.

Matson zeros in on chlamydia and HIV while Maverakis does syphilis, herpes and tuberculosis. The most common tests are assigned specific schedules: HIV and syphilis on Mondays and Thursdays, tuberculosis on Tuesdays and Fridays, “and everything else wherever we can squeeze it in,” Matson said.

Time has proven the system a success for Matson and Maverakis, who have worked at the lab for 26 and 11 years, respectively.

“We’ve both been here long enough and worked together long enough so we don’t have to go over every little thing,” Maverakis, 59, said. “We have a pretty efficient operation.”

In addition to testing for communicable diseases, the lab is responsible for analyzing water samples for bacterial infestations, food particles for poisoning, animal brains for rabies and stool specimens for salmonella.

Although most of the lab’s work centers on testing for infectious illnesses, none of its employees has contracted any diseases.

“There is a risk, but as long as you follow safety precautions and do things the right way, you’re fine,” Matson said. “I don’t lose sleep over it.”

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For airborne diseases like tuberculosis, safety measures are stringent. Maverakis examines the tests under a large glass container that resembles a fish tank.

Equipped with a blue fluorescent bulb and special fans that create an invisible safety wall, the tank allows the rubber-gloved Maverakis to handle vials containing contaminated blood without risk of becoming infected.

HIV tests are attended to with equally fastidious care. On a recent afternoon Matson fussed over a batch of results like a mother hen over her young.

The specimens had been prepared for him by a lab assistant, who meticulously labeled each of the 56 HIV tests for identification, poured the blood from the syringes into vials and placed them in a large, spinning machine.

When the whirling machine whooshed to a stop, it revealed blood samples neatly separated into their clotted red parts, which sunk to the bottom, and their amber-colored syrupy parts, which floated to the top.

Matson collected drops from the syrupy parts and treated and incubated them in a compartmentalized tray.

Four hours later Matson hovered over the tray, looking for the deep yellow hue that indicates a positive result. Two of the 56 tests had turned the telltale yellow.

“Yes, yes,” Matson said, matter-of-factly confirming that those two golden blobs represented the HIV-infected immune systems of two Ventura County residents.

“In a test of this size, one or two positives is not unusual,” he said, carefully lifting the tray to examine its contents and record the results.

Just to be sure, each positive test will be rerun two more times before the results are officially confirmed.

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Several times a year, in the course of conducting a test, Matson will come across an unidentifiable culture. “Something really obscure or strangely manifested,” Matson said.

He will then send the specimen to the state lab in Sacramento for analysis. If that staff fails to identify the sample, it will make its way to the National Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

“Sometimes they will look at it and say, ‘Oh yes, this is an unidentifiable organism,’ and pop it into their freezer for a few years until someone has time to figure it out,” Matson said.

Aside from the occasional mystery specimen, daily life under the sterile lab’s fluorescent bulbs might seem risky, repetitive and often dreary. But the biologists in Room 27 seem genuinely fond of their work.

“I just find microbiology extremely interesting, and I like public health work,” Matson said. “When you start off working on a specimen, you have no idea what the outcome is going to be. There is a lot of variation so I never get bored.”

“It’s a blast,” Maverakis agreed. “I can’t imagine doing anything else.”