In Montana, a doctor battles the planet's most dangerous diseases

Ray Ring in the High Country News: In his day job, Marshall Bloom is the associate director for scientific management at the Rocky Mountain Laboratories, a cutting-edge federal research campus in an unlikely place: Hamilton, Mont., a town of about 4,500 in the beautiful Bitterroot Valley. Nearly 500 workers in dozens of lab buildings are dedicated to studying "emerging infectious diseases" like the Ebola virus (from Africa), Lassa fever (caused by another African virus) and chronic wasting disease. The effort began more than a hundred years ago, when a few tent-based researchers started studying a disease that killed loggers; they discovered tick-borne Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. Today, the campus is part of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases network, and it includes a "Biosafety Level 4" lab, where researchers wearing "positive-pressure suits" work with the planet's most dangerous diseases, some of which could be exploited by bioterrorists.

Bloom, who holds a medical degree from Washington University, has worked here for more than 40 years. He focused on tick-borne diseases to begin with, and then beginning in 2002, he oversaw the construction of the Level 4 lab.

...HCN: What makes your work so important? Is it because we're worried about terrorism, as well as diseases spreading from monkeys in Africa?

Bloom: When I was in medical school (in the early 1970s), the era of infectious diseases was thought to be over. We had antibiotics, and we had vaccines. However, that feeling proved to be extremely premature. Since the mid-1970s, we've identified somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 to 60 brand-new infectious diseases which people had never heard of before. A few examples are HIV-AIDS, Hepatitis C, Ebola virus, SARS, avian influenza, Marburg virus, multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, multi-drug resistant staph. Some are intentionally emerging infections like anthrax (spread by bioterrorists). The other causes include development moving into remote parts of the world -- that's probably one of the reasons for the emergence of HIV-AIDS, people going into the jungle harvesting wood and things like that, going into these areas where these diseases probably existed in small populations. (Back then) if there was an outbreak, it probably burned itself out and didn't have the opportunity to spread, but once you have a highway going into an area like that, and trucks going back and forth, the opportunity to spread those infections goes up....

The Bitterroot Valley, viewed from the top of El Capitan, shot by G. Thomas, public domain