Lab Matters Summer 2017 | Page 38

member spotlight

The first time Bernd Jilly, PhD, set foot in Alaska was in the blustery month of January.“ I remember it like it was yesterday,” he said.“ We had landed at the Anchorage airport and a blizzard had just started. It was in the days before they had jetways, and as they opened the door, all this snow came flying in. I stepped out on the ramp and thought, God I love this place. I just fell in love with the state. It was love at first sight.”

Today, Jilly directs the state’ s only public health laboratory( PHL), comprising the Alaska State Public Health Lab in Anchorage and the Alaska State Virology Lab at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks( UAF), some 360 miles away. His staff support public health monitoring and response activities for Alaska’ s 750,000 residents and for the Alaska Native Tribes.

Alaska is both the biggest US state in terms of area— more than twice the size of Texas— and among the least populous. In fact, much of the state is uninhabited wilderness, including large tracts of tundra, mountains and glaciers. The most important industry here is oil and natural gas extraction, which provides more than 80 % of state revenues. The second most lucrative industry is fishing along the state’ s 34,000-mile tidal coastline and in thousands of rivers and streams. Finally, Alaska’ s majestic scenery

The Alaska Public Health Laboratory and abundant wildlife bring in about $ 2 billion of tourist dollars annually.

Needless to say, there is much humananimal interaction here( including subsistence hunting), necessitating laboratory confirmation of animal health threats, including common zoonoses, such as brucellosis in caribou and marine mammals and tularemia in rabbits. The state ranks # 1 nationally in foodborne botulism— usually relatively mild cases of Clostridium botulinum type E, associated with fermented native dishes featuring fish and animal parts. After the partial meltdown of Japan’ s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in 2011, there was intense concern about possible radioactive contamination of Alaska fisheries.“ Thank god, it never materialized,” said Jilly.“ Our fish were well below background levels.”

Yet despite its rural character, America’ s“ Frontier State” has not been immune to the public health problems prevalent in more populous jurisdictions. For example, Alaska consistently ranks among the top five states in TB burden, concentrated in Native Alaskan and immigrant Asian communities( although the state has seen little drug-resistant TB). Recently, there was a significant problem with group A beta-hemolytic streptococcus and Staphylococcus aureus infection in the homeless community. At the moment, Jilly is working to identify funds for a general survey of the type and quality of opioids in use here. The idea is to test residual material extracted from syringes collected by the state’ s needle exchange program. He is also hoping that a method can be developed to simultaneously test for HIV and hepatitis C in opioid users.

Facility

The main 34,000-square-foot Anchorage facility sits on six acres of protected wetlands, within sight of the Chugach Mountain Range, whose highest peak tops 13,000 feet. About a third of the single-story, 17-year-old building is reserved for the state medical examiner, and an enclosed mechanical penthouse is sited on the roof.“ Everything has to be indoors,” said Jilly.“ No pipes outside.” The laboratory is rated BSL-3 +.

The 27,000-square-foot virology laboratory is shared with the animal research program at the UAF. It takes up two floors and a basement and boasts an ABSL-3 space, dedicated to animal research by UAF faculty.

Director

Born in a small town outside Stuttgart, Germany, Jilly immigrated to the United States with his family in the early 1960s, and grew up in Chicago.“ I was always interested in science,” he said.“ And when I got to college, I thought, You can’ t make money being a biology major, so I discovered the med tech program.” After graduating from the University of Illinois at Chicago, he worked as a clinical laboratory scientist for a few years before returning to his alma mater to earn a MS in laboratory medicine and a PhD in pathology. Upon graduating, Jilly said,“ I was lucky enough to land an assistant professorship in the clinical lab sciences program at the University of Illinois.” He served seven years in that position, before moving to Berkeley, CA, to lead CDC’ s National Laboratory Training Network in the Pacific Region.“ And that’ s how I got introduced to Alaska,” he said.“ I thought if there were ever an opportunity to move