WSU on the ground in East Africa

Disease detectives from Washington State University work in East Africa to identify and track emerging diseases before they spread, and to find new approaches to combat old diseases.

Much of the work of WSU scientists, local experts, and U.S. and international partners there focus on zoonotic diseases, which are transmitted from animals to people and cause most new infectious diseases in humans. Rabies, Ebola virus and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) are examples.

In East Africa, many people are farmers or live near wildlife. There’s also widespread poverty and inadequate health systems. Those factors combine to make the region high-risk for new infectious diseases, and a logical site for WSU research.  

So scientists test camel herds and herders for MERS, a virus more deadly than Covid-19. In Kenya and Tanzania, researchers are vaccinating dogs against rabies, a disease that’s nearly always contracted through a dog bite and that kills 60,000 people a year worldwide. WSU was chosen by the National Institutes of Health to lead an international research hub in Kenya, one of 10 in a global network that functions as both an early-warning and rapid-response system for new viruses.   

“There’s pushback that we shouldn’t go looking for a virus, but that’s a pretty naïve argument,” said Kariuki Njenga, a professor at the WSU Paul G. Allen School for Global Health in Kenya. “We need to know what could be coming our way so that we can make vaccines and treatments.”  

Guy Palmer, WSU’s Senior Director of Global Health and the founding director of the Paul G. Allen School for Global Health, said identifying and controlling virus outbreaks in Africa is a mixture of altruism and self-interest. 

“By understanding an outbreak there, we are aware of the risk so we can begin to screen for it in the United States,” he said.