Campus Review Vol 30. Issue 04 | April 2020 | Seite 20

INDUSTRY & RESEARCH
campusreview.com.au
Contact tracers
The virus detectives of the world.
By Wade Zaglas
The release of the 2011 film
Contagion starting Kate Winslet
introduced the world to contact
tracers: highly skilled individuals who use
a range of methods to ‘trace’ infectious
humans and those with whom they have
come into contact.
As COVID-19 chalks up over two million
cases worldwide and more than 150,000
deaths, such painstaking detective work has
never been more critical.
To learn more about this specialist role
and how it’s being applied, Campus Review
spoke to Dr Bret Hart, an adjunct clinical
associate professor from Curtin Medical
School, who is a previous director of three
public health units in WA actively involved in
contact tracing.
CR: Why is contact tracing important and
how does it help contain COVID-19?
BH: Well, it certainly plays a vital role. In
fact, contact tracers are the only people
that can really protect us from the spread of
COVID-19. So, they’re really critical, but it’s
something they’ve been doing for probably
over 100 years.
It started with sexually transmitted
infections in American troops in the 1930s.
Someone came up with the idea that, if
you find the person who’s got the infection
and the person they’ve partnered with, you
might be able to stop it spreading.
Then they started applying it to a whole
host of other conditions with variable
degrees of success, depending on the way
it’s spread. There’s now over 100 infectious
diseases which are notifiable. So, by law, the
person who diagnoses the condition has to
report it. So that can be a laboratory, or it
can be a doctor.
Can it be frustrating or even demoralising
being a contact tracer?
Contact tracers are unsung heroes,
because they do work behind the scenes
that we never get to hear about, and
they don’t tend to get rewarded either,
because their success occurs when
nothing happens.
So, we don’t get an outbreak of
meningococcal meningitis, for example,
because contact tracers will go to
work very quickly, as it is such a rapidly
deteriorating disease. You’ve got to get to
those contacts immediately, and then with
that you can prescribe something to them
that counteracts them getting it.
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