The Plum Island Animal Disease Center, located off the eastern tip of Long Island, N.Y., houses a super-secure biocontaminant area where the most dangerous foreign animal diseases are kept for research and teaching purposes. Those diseases, if released by accident or terrorism, could decimate the domestic livestock industry. Some could spread from animals to humans.
In December 2005, Kevin Lahmers, assistant professor of the Washington Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory (WADDL) at the College of Veterinary Medicine, spent a week there studying those diseases.
“To get in, after showing my ID repeatedly, I disrobed and walked naked through a shower, then walked through several air locks and dressed in Tyvex coveralls, boots, goggles and hairnet. To get out, I disrobed and washed my hands for 3 minutes, then spit and blew my nose five times, then showered and shampooed my hair for 5 minutes, then dressed in new coveralls, walked through a series of airlocks and repeated the entire process, then dressed and checked out.”
Why did he put himself through that process every day for a week?
“Plum Island provides the best training available in the U.S.,” he explained. “Only 30 people are selected for this every year. I was able to go because John and Charyn Zarzycki paid for everything. Without their support, I would not have been able to go.”
Among their other donations to the university, the Zarzyckis, who live in Tonasket, have underwritten the training visits to Plum Island for two pathologists from the College of Veterinary Medicine: Lahmers and Kevin Snekvik.
Charyn Zarzycki explained that they decided to provide the scholarships after watching television footage of the tragic slaughter of cattle in Britain when foot-and-mouth disease was discovered there in 2001. Terry McElwain, executive director of WADDL, suggested that they could help protect Washington livestock from a similar fate by supporting the education of Washington pathologists at Plum Island.
From their training, Lahmers and Snekvik agree that they are much better prepared to correctly diagnose the diseases of the animal samples they see. Specimens are sent to their lab from all over the U.S., but primarily from the Pacific Northwest.
Additionally, because of his experience at Plum Island, Lahmers said he will be able to better instruct his students in this vital field and the 30 members of his training cohort have become a valuable network that he can rely on for assistance in disease identification.
“This was an invaluable experience, one that I could not have gotten in any other way, and for that I can not thank the Zarzyckis enough,” he said.
“I was told there are two ways to get famous as a pathologist. One is to diagnose a foreign animal disease. The other is to not diagnose a foreign animal disease. I would much rather be in the first category.”
