After nearly 20 years of research at the intersection of ecology, public health, and urban policy, Michael Z. Levy, Associate Professor of Epidemiology at the Perelman School of Medicine, understands better than most how infectious disease outbreaks occur – and that we are not do enough to prevent it.
Researchers at the Zoonotic Disease Research Center have monitored Arequipa for years to find households with Chagas-infected insects, target houses with insecticides, and then use data and epidemiological models to track where the next outbreak of the disease might occur . (Image: Penn Medicine News)
“My big concern right now is that we will have warehouses full of masks and that the next pandemic won’t be in the air – it will be carried by a beetle,” says Levy. “If we wait for bed bugs to start spreading disease, we will be in the same situation that we are now with COVID. We’ll have missed every opportunity to stop it. “
After graduating from Amherst College, Levy traveled to Chile, where his fear of Chagas disease, which spreads the Chirimacha insect, kept him awake at night with a flashlight in his hand and searched his sheets for the deadly insect. “I had this real phobia of the Chagas beetles. It’s a terrible disease, ”he says.
Years later, in 2001, Levy read that Chagas had killed a baby in Arequipa, Peru’s sprawling second largest city of one million people: “If an infant has one acute case of Chagas disease, it usually means there are more 1,000 cases you don’t see, ”says Levy.
The burgeoning epidemiologist knew he had to go to Arequipa to fight the disease that had haunted and riveted him for years.
When he arrived in Arequipa, Levy and a colleague from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention met with representatives from the city’s Ministry of Health, who introduced them to the Arequipa-based Chagas expert: the late Eleazar Córdova, then a microbiologist at the Universidad Nacional de San Agustin.
With funding from the Government of Canada, the Department of Health launched a conventional door-to-door insecticide treatment campaign, the methods of which were remotely dictated by the Pan American Health Organization. Levy worked with Córdova to embed studies into efforts to understand the local epidemic – the largest of all time in a city – and to tailor and recreate control strategies for other urban areas.
“There was a lot of press and the press got politicians moving,” says Levy. “If there is political will, you can control a disease.”
By the fall of 2019, Levy had been back in Philadelphia for nearly a decade and faced yet another nightmarish insect: Confident that the city was finally ready to do something about bedbugs.
For the past four years, he has been a member of a city-commissioned Bedbug Task Force, made up of local scientists, pest control experts, and community activists, working diligently on a bill to stop the pests from spreading in a city has been called “the most bug-infested” in the country by Terminix.
“What you need is a smart policy that encourages people to report the infestation quickly. If you oblige the renter to pay for the treatment, they may not report them. I don’t care who is responsible – if they don’t report it, it will spread. “
Read more at Penn Medicine News.
