A Detective’s Eye for Finding Infectious Agents
After the boy’s searing fever came back a fifth time, his mother was frantic and the physicians were puzzled.
UC Irvine infectious-disease expert Dr. Alan Barbour was called in and quickly recognized the boy’s ailment as relapsing fever.
The culprit was a tick.
“Relapsing fever is becoming more and more common. It’s carried by a special kind of tick that lives around mountain cabins. This tick crawls out at night and bites people when they’re sleeping,” said Barbour, a UCI professor of medicine, microbiology and molecular genetics. “I’ve heard of several cases of this recently from people who stayed in cabins up at Arrowhead and the Big Bear area.”
The 51-year-old Irvine resident knows how serious the bite of a single tick can be. In 1981, while working as a researcher at the National Institutes of Health, he isolated the cause of Lyme disease. It turned out to be a corkscrew-shaped bacterium most commonly carried by the deer tick. The germ, Borrelia burgdorferi, was named after Barbour’s fellow researcher, Willy Burgdorfer.
“Willy discovered the cause of Lyme disease, and I was the first person to grow it in the laboratory. It was like AIDS when we first discovered it. People knew it was there, but they didn’t know what caused it.
“It was one of those serendipitous things. One day, Willy told me that he had seen something in the microscope that might be related to Lyme disease. It was in these deer ticks that he was looking at for another reason, and he saw these things swimming around. I was able to grow this bacteria in the laboratory, which turned out to be the cause of the disease.
“It turned out that this bacteria would grow in this medium that I had been working with for another reason. I tried it and it worked. I was very lucky. When you can grow it in the laboratory, then you can have a test. That provided the first diagnostic test for Lyme disease.”
*
Lyme disease was first recognized in 1975 after a puzzling outbreak of arthritis was reported near Lyme, Conn. There were 16,000 cases reported in 1996 by state health departments throughout the United States to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, almost double the number reported in 1993.
“Luck and serendipity do have a lot to do with success in science, but you really have to be prepared to take advantage of it. Willy and I had a lot of background and training, and we were prepared to do something with the discovery. A lot of people had the same training and the same skills, but we just got lucky.”
Most researchers had long suspected that Lyme disease was caused by a virus. Burgdorfer and Barbour’s discovery helped shift attention back to bacteria.
“There are fashions that come and go in science. During this time, there was very little interest in bacteriology, because antibiotics were thought to be able to cure everything caused by bacteria, and viruses were going to explain everything else.”
The lack of interest in bacteriology contributed to the reluctance of the medical community to recognize that the spiral-shaped bacterium H. pylori causes most stomach ulcers, Barbour said.
“Now, we have all these antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and the recognition that bacteria are at the center of some very important problems.
“There was the so-called golden era when Louis Pasteur and all these other researchers discovered the causes of different infections. And that’s happening again now to some extent. There’s HIV, toxic-shock syndrome and Lyme disease. I think we’ll find that similar infections are the cause of other chronic diseases.
“There may be an infectious agent that causes rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis, or at least gets it started. It may be something very common that people have an uncommon reaction to.
“I don’t want to give the impression that this is proven yet, but some forms of heart disease and heart attacks may be brought on, if not caused by, a common infection like herpes or something like that. There are serious investigations of whether that could be true or not. A few years ago, that idea would have been laughed away. There is less skepticism now.”
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
Profile: Alan Barbour
Age: 51
Hometown: Los Angeles
Residence: Irvine
Family: Wife, Ann; two grown sons
Education: Bachelor’s degree, UC Berkeley; medical degree, Tufts University School of Medicine
Background: Epidemic intelligence service officer, Centers for Disease Control, 1974-76; epidemiologist, World Health Organization Small Pox Eradication program in India, 1975; fellow in infectious diseases at University of Utah, 1977-80; senior staff fellow, National Institutes of Health and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, 1980-1984; head of arthropod-borne diseases, NIH and NIAID, 1984-86; infectious diseases department head, University of Texas Health Science Center (San Antonio), 1986-92 (also professor of microbiology and medicine, 1986-96); UCI professor of medicine, microbiology and molecular genetics since 1996
Lyme disease involvement: First researcher to isolate cause of Lyme disease while working at NIH; developed Lyme disease vaccine (awaiting FDA approval); author, “Lyme Disease: The Cause, the Cure, the Controversy,” published in 1996 by Johns Hopkins University Press
On battling bacteria: “With infectious diseases, it’s often a puzzle to figure out what a patient may have, where with most other diseases, there’s not as much mystery to it. . . . It’s the medical detective work that interests me.”
Source: Alan Barbour; Researched by RUSS LOAR / For The Times
