Tufts Veterinarians Help Fight Terrorism

In the post-9/11 world, the skills of veterinarians are needed beyond the scope of everyday pet care. Tufts’ veterinary school is on the front lines of the fight against bioterrorism.

No. Grafton, Mass. [01.31.05] In the fall of 2001, the threat of terrorism on American soil became a reality, and anthrax was transformed into a household word. Faced with the new threat of domestic bioterrorism – particularly with agents that can be easily transmitted via animals – there is a new role for veterinarians, which Tufts is helping to fill.

“Before 9/11, bioterrorism was something that only military vets really spoke about,” Dr. George Saperstein, who heads the Department of Environmental and Population Health at Tufts School of Veterinary Medicine, told The Chronicle of Higher Education.

That has all changed. Government agencies now look to veterinarians like those from Tufts to help them stay one step ahead of possible future bioterrorist incidents.

The anthrax letters, which infected 22 people and killed five in 2001, were one of the first salvos in this new battle, with veterinarians called in to help explain various scenarios involving that and other deadly diseases.

A common disease in cattle, anthrax was not an unfamiliar threat to veterinarians. “Anthrax was not a new disease to us, nor was it something that made us shake in our boots,” Saperstein told the Chronicle.

According to the Chronicle, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control cites three-quarters of diseases that could be employed by terrorists as zoonotic, or transferred from animals to humans. That makes for a lot of dangerous possibilities.

“Why not release it in a rat in New York City or a moose in Maine? Let it loose and watch people get scared,” Saperstein theorized.

An increased attentiveness to patterns in the animal world is integral to determining what possible contaminants or foreign agents are affecting the environment.

“We need to look at these sentinels and ask, what are they telling us about changes in the world around us?” Dr. Mark Pokras, director of Tufts’ Wildlife Clinic, told the Chronicle. “When we see die-offs, are they due to an infectious agent that could be spreading?”

Tomorrow’s veterinarians are trained to be alert to these phenomena. The International Veterinary Medicine program at Tufts Veterinary School prepares students to be aware of the relationship between the ‘animal world’ and the ‘people world’ when it comes to disease outbreaks and other public health issues that have global repercussions.

Tufts’ commitment to bioterrorism research was recognized in the fall of 2003 when the National Institutes of Health awarded $25 million to the veterinary school for research into food- and water-borne illnesses.

“This is part of homeland security,” Saul Tzipori, director of Tufts' Division of Infectious Diseases and leader of the research initiative, told the Associated Press at the time. “The government is really investing a lot of money into building up our biodefenses.”

The research bore fruit this fall when Tufts researchers announced that they had decoded the genome for Cryptosporidium, a dangerous water-borne, disease-carrying parasite.

"Sequencing the genome of Cryptosporidium will help us determine the underlying mechanisms of the organism's unusual resistance to antimicrobial agents, and enable us to develop preventive vaccines and/or pharmaceutical treatments," Tzipori said.

Among other efforts, Tufts Veterinary School graduate and adjunct professor Jon Epstein (V/MPH’02) – the first recipient of Tufts’ certificate in international veterinary medicine – spent time in Malaysia to research the deadly Nipah virus, classified by the Centers for Disease Control as a potential bioterrorism agent.

From the labs in Grafton to the jungles in Asia, the battlegrounds of this fight are found internationally.

Zenda Berrada, a doctoral student in comparative biomedical sciences at Tufts, is a foot soldier in this war. Stationed in Martha’s Vineyard, she traps animals and tests their ticks for tularemia – a bacterial disease classified by the government as being as dangerous as the plague.

It’s front-line work like this that could uncover the next round of bioterrorist attacks in the United States.

“Veterinarians can give a heads-up if something unusual is going on in the animal population,” Berrada told the Chronicle.