MEMBERSHIP
“That Gem of a Lab”:
County of San Luis Obispo Public Health Laboratory
by Nancy Maddox, MPH, writer
“When people ask me, ‘Where is San
Luis Obispo County; what is it near?’ said
James Beebe, PhD, D(ABMM), “I have to tell
them, ‘Nothing.’ Because we’re halfway
up the coast between Los Angeles and
San Francisco.” Yet, this statement from
the director of the county’s public health
laboratory (PHL) is not entirely correct.
Although San Luis Obispo County is a
largely rural, agricultural jurisdiction
(population 270,000), it is home to the
University of California Polytechnic
Institute, Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant,
and a long sea coast that attracts tourists
and yields up oysters, clams and mussels,
which the PHL tests along with the water
they live in. It also enjoys a large swath
of forestland, home to bats, skunks and
other wildlife that occasionally contract
rabies—another source of PHL testing.
In addition to farmers growing wine
grapes, strawberries, avocados and
other produce, the county has attracted
a number of software and biotech
firms—“started because people wanted
to live where the weather is as kind as it
is here” and the views so “extraordinarily
beautiful.”
Since implementing two molecular
syndromic test panels—for respiratory
and gastrointestinal pathogens—the
PHL has been better able to connect with
certain clinical communities, appreciative
of the same-day turn-around-time
unavailable in local private sector labs.
Said Beebe, “We know what’s circulating
because these specimens are coming to
us,” giving health authorities “a better
finger on the pulse of what’s happening in
the community.”
Other community concerns of note
include about a half dozen cases/year
of tuberculosis (TB) among migrant
farmworkers and valley fever, an endemic
fungal disease that rarely disseminates,
but can be lethal.
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LAB MATTERS Fall 2019
The team at the San Luis Obispo County Public Health Laboratory. Photo: San Louis Obispo County PHL
Facility Director
The laboratory occupies about 3,000
square feet of a 10,000-square-foot
stucco and brick building built into the
side of hill not far from the Old Town
Historic District, with its colonial Spanish
architecture. The vintage building,
built in 1953, is shared with the public
health department’s main offices and
main clinic. From 2003 to 2017, the
laboratory was renovated room-by-
room—a drawn-out experience Beebe
likens to “remodeling your kitchen while
you’re cooking.” He said, “The staff was
amazingly resilient—they just kept on
cooking.” Today, laboratorians reap the
benefits of that process, with an open
workspace and three-room biosafety
suite. They also enjoy what Beebe dubs
“one of the most beautiful views of any
PHL in the nation”—a vista dominated by
two of the Seven Sisters extinct volcanic
peaks, Bishop Peak and St. Luis Peak, after
which San Luis Obispo County is named. Beebe began his lengthy laboratory career
in his home state of New Jersey, where
he earned BS and MS degrees in biology
from Seton Hall University and a PhD in
microbiology from Rutgers University.
After his third college graduation, he
taught at Cornell University Medical
College in Manhattan for five years,
before completing a two-year post-doc
at Columbia Presbyterian Medical
Center, where he learned “how to run
a lab.” For the next decade, that’s what
he did, working at various times for the
companies now called LabCorp and Quest
Diagnostics. Beebe left his last work
site in Denver to do a year of Christian
ministry service at Florida’s Tallahassee
Memorial Regional Medical Center. When
he returned home, he “wound up” at the
Colorado Public Health Laboratory where
he worked for 20 years, finishing up as
both laboratory director and manager of
the newborn screening and microbiology
laboratories. “It was a great run,” he said.
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