The Technologically Speaking Podcast sits down with Lindsay Gabbert, a microbiologist at the S&T Plum Island Animal Disease Center (PIADC). Lindsay and her colleagues at PIADC are on the front lines keeping dangerous animal diseases at bay and away from our farms. She talks about what the greatest threats are and what S&T and PIADC are doing to thwart them. She also shares anecdotes about her time working at PIADC, one of the most interesting and unique labs in the United States, nestled on a small and historic island in the Long Island Sound.
Show Notes
Guest: Lindsay Gabbert, Microbiologist, Plum Island Animal Disease Center, S&T
Host: Brittany Greco, Senior Communications Specialist, S&T
[00:00:00] Lindsay Gabbert: Agriculture is considered critical infrastructure. We need safe, available food and Plum Island for many years has been working to protect that for us.
[00:00:11] Dave DeLizza: This is Technologically Speaking, the official podcast for the Department of Homeland Security, Science and Technology Directorate, or S and T as we call it. Join us as we meet the science and technology experts on the front lines, keeping America safe.
[00:00:24] Brittany: Hello everyone and welcome to today's episode of Technologically Speaking. I'm your host, Brittany Greco, and we are very thankful to have Lindsay Gabbert here today with us. She is a microbiologist at the S&T Plum Island Animal Disease Center. Lindsay, thank you so much for joining us today.
[00:00:40] Lindsay Gabbert: Yeah, thank you for having me.
[00:00:41] Brittany: So just to kick things off, what do you do at the Plum Island Animal Disease Center?
[00:00:46] Lindsay Gabbert: I have been at Plum Island for 14 years now. Primarily we study virology of livestock diseases, so livestock, cows, pigs, diseases that aren't currently in the U. S. and we try to keep them out.
[00:00:59] Brittany: That's very important. Can you tell us a little bit about why it is important to keep those diseases out, and to prepare for them, even though they're not here?
[00:01:07] Lindsay Gabbert: Agriculture in the U. S. is a multibillion-dollar industry, and we all have the luxury of being able to go to the grocery store and get affordable food. Different kinds of food that's imported from other countries. So those diseases not being present here allow us to have that. I guess you could call it a luxury that some other countries currently don't have. Agriculture and livestock specifically is a huge export industry for the US, so The absence of infectious disease allows us to export products abroad as well.
[00:01:43] Brittany: I think you're touching on an important distinction that some people may not understand about the work that's done at Plum Island. It's not about diseases that can cross over from animals to humans. This research that we're doing at Plum Island is focused exclusively on animal borne diseases, right?
[00:02:00] Lindsay Gabbert: That's correct. We don't work with zoonotic diseases, which is what you were referring to, infectious diseases that can cross over from animals to human. The agents that we work with are only infecting the animals.
[00:02:14] Brittany: I imagine there's a lot of safety precautions in place. If you’re able to, can you briefly highlight what some of those safety precautions are just to make sure that it's a safe and secure laboratory environment?
[00:02:24] Plum Island operates at the BSL 3 level. It's very standard laboratory biosafety practices that are common among all labs; wearing PPE, gloves, lab coats, that sort of a thing. It’s nice for us because we don't work with agents that infect humans that the risk to us is lower than at other facilities that are studying zoonotic pathogens.
[00:02:46] Brittany: And just for folks who may not be familiar, what is BSL? Is that just how we measure… I'm immediately thinking of like, it's DEFCON 1 versus DEFCON 5. Is BSL just the level of safety that's required? What do those different designations mean?
[00:03:00] Lindsay Gabbert: Biosafety level is a common standard that all laboratories fall under. It really depends on what agents that you're working with in that space. So, biosafety level 1 will be pathogens that are non-infectious to humans or animals, or, there's approved vaccines for that. As you go up from 1 to 4, those agents are going to become more dangerous, more infectious. When you get to biosafety level 4, which we are not, that's for working with human pathogens, things such as Ebola, things that there aren't cures for. And the biosafety and requirements, obviously, are much greater at higher levels.
[00:03:41] Brittany: Definitely. You've been there for 14 years. Did you ever have any moments when you were first starting out of feeling nervous going into this type of environment?
[00:03:51] Lindsay Gabbert: Not really. At Plum Island, the scariest thing is that we have to take a shower.
[00:03:55] Brittany: For some, that might be scary,
[00:03:57] Lindsay Gabbert: yeah, so, you know, getting over that, mental hurdle is probably the toughest thing, but no, everybody's really positive there, there's lots of great mentors that help you along the way to become comfortable working in that sort of environment.
[00:04:11] Brittany: Can you tell me a little bit more about coordinating with U. S. Department of Agriculture at Plum Island?
[00:04:16] Lindsay: So, there's 3 federal agencies present on Plum Island. There's DHS S&T, there's USDA ARS, which is the Agricultural Research Service and USDA APHIS, which is the Animal Plant Health Inspection Service. So, all 3 of our groups, not necessarily share laboratory space, but we're right down the hall from one another, so there's a lot of collaboration that goes on. APHIS primarily deals with animal disease diagnostics for foreign animal diseases. So, if there is a sick animal on a farm, they actually will ship those samples out and they’re the group in charge of testing them to make sure that there's no trans boundary animal diseases, no viruses, and reporting that back so that if needed a quarantine could be put in place. USDA ARS is also doing a lot of basic research primarily on vaccines for African Swine Fever virus and Foot and Mouth disease virus. So, it's nice to have all of that knowledge from the 3 groups kind of concentrated in one place, and we can learn what the gaps in the field are that one group may have, and that we can try to get answers for.
[00:05:24] Brittany: It does sound like there is a lot of necessary collaboration in these spaces. Because not only is it a health issue for these big herds, it's also a livelihood issue for the farmers, for the people who own these animals, who own these herds, and whose livelihoods depend on being able to safely transport them and sell them. In your work, do you consider, not just the security aspects of making sure that we protect domestic animals from foreign diseases, but do you also think about the potential outcomes, the influence on the economic sector, the animal health sector? Do you think about those things in your daily work?
[00:06:01] Lindsay Gabbert: Yeah, I think that comes into play a lot, and these diseases that we study are referred to as trans boundary animal diseases or TATs and they're called that because they're not a local problem. It's a global problem, and with travel and transportation and imports, exports, everything that occurs in this country, it's really easy for something, say, in Italy to be here in 8 hours and spread very quickly. Agriculture is considered critical infrastructure. We need safe, available food, and Plum Island for many years has been working to protect that for us.
[00:06:43] Brittany: What's something that you've learned over your 14 years at Plum Island that you didn't know coming in?
[00:06:48] Lindsay Gabbert: Prior to working at Plum Island, I studied mosquito viruses and human diseases. So, moving on to the animal side was definitely very different. You think about diseases that infect only animals, different than ones that can also infect people, the public health component isn't there. I mean I've learned so much about virology since I've been there. I started out really kind of looking at more pathogenesis, immunology, importance of different viral proteins and over the years I've kind of transitioned into looking at agricultural biosecurity. So, really the projects focus on the response and recovery phase of disease outbreaks. How long can pathogen survive, in feed, on a farm, on manure? What sorts of things or interventions can we take, as far as decontamination or disinfection, to clean up after an outbreak occurs? It's definitely been a big learning process for me over the years, working in different spaces and thinking about all those questions differently.
[00:07:54] Brittany: What made you switch over? How did you find yourself transitioning from focusing on mosquitoes and human based illnesses, to focusing on transboundary animal diseases?
[00:08:04] Lindsay Gabbert: I think it all kind of comes back to that one big health concept that what's happening in humans and animals and the environment - it's kind of all connected. Once you study one virus, it's not that hard to switch over to a different one. I was really intrigued by the idea of working at Plum Island, getting to take the ferry every day, and it's definitely a unique place to work. My initial plan was only to be there for one year and I've been there 14 years now.
[00:08:35] Brittany: How do you decide what to study at Plum Island?
[00:08:37] Lindsay Gabbert: Plum Island is the only laboratory in the U. S. that has select agent registration to work specifically with Foot and Mouth Disease and African Swine Fever. Those are our two high priority viruses that we work on. There are other labs that can work with ASF in the U. S., but not FMD, so our priorities are determined by the risks that exist, and those two pathogens are highest risks for coming into the U. S. and causing an outbreak or issues with our food supply chains. We prioritize what sorts of projects that we're working on based on the questions that producers have in the field. We work very closely with industry stakeholders, such as the National Pork Board, and the Swine Health Information Center, they determine if there's a gap in the field. The producers want to know can they heat their tools to a certain temperature? Will that inactivate virus so they can move those between barns? They often reach out to us, with an issue or a question, and we try to develop some scientific data that they can use to implement policies for the work they do in the field.
[00:09:53] Brittany: I think you're touching on something that is not necessarily like a sensitive topic, but it's something that people may not always think about, which is, we're talking about animal health, but we're also talking about animals that are used in food, so, it's trying to make sure that they're protected, and we try and avoid these mass outbreaks because it does lead to animal suffering, and it does lead to, depopulation, I think is the term you used earlier. If I'm understanding it correctly, the goal is to make sure that these animals are safe and protected, while still understanding that they will eventually become part of the food supply.
[00:10:29] Lindsay Gabbert: There's different types of food production systems in the U.S. Yes, we have some farms that have high concentrations of animals, and that's how we have plentiful supplies of beef and pork. There's also small backyard farmers, people with ranches, animals that are not necessarily going directly into the food supply. We have lots of dairy cattle, animals that spend many years on farms that we also want to protect. We think about it as a global issue as well. We're fortunate to have food production systems like that in the US, but in many other countries those animals that people have are feeding their family directly, they're not going for export. It's the information and the science, the things that we learn that can be applied elsewhere.
[00:11:21] Brittany: oes Plum Island share research or is there any type of global information sharing on efforts like this?
[00:11:27] Lindsay Gabbert: So all the scientific work that we do is published online. It's available. We try to get the data into peer reviewed manuscripts so that it’s available for everyone to see.
[00:11:40] Brittany: How did you end up at Plum Island? What was your path to the lab?
[00:11:44] Lindsay Gabbert: Prior to Plum Island I was living and working in Puerto Rico.
[00:11:49] Brittany: Oh, wow.
[00:11:49] Lindsay Gabbert: With the Centers for Disease Control, studying mosquito borne diseases, such as dengue fever. I had a research fellowship there that ended and I applied to various different institutions, NIH, FDA, Plum Island, and they brought me out for an interview and I really just thought it was a unique place to work and that's where I ended up moving to. It was my first time on the East coast. I grew up in Minnesota, so I'm a Midwest girl, but yeah, I mean, it's a great place. place to be.
[00:12:21] Brittany: And what got you interested in microbiology?
[00:12:23] Lindsay Gabbert: I think I was always really interested in microbiology and kind of how infectious disease shapes a lot of the things that we do and a lot of history in general. I'm reading about the 1918 flu pandemic and how that impacted all countries was really interesting to me. And studying the small things that we can't see that have such a big impact on our life was really interesting to me.
[00:12:54] Brittany: What advice really stuck with you as you were pursuing this career?
[00:12:58] Lindsay Gabbert: I don't know. I think it's really important for any science that you're doing just to keep being curious and keep asking questions. So, anytime you have some sort of scientific discovery, it really just leads to more questions that you don't know. So just to keep following those paths to learn as much as you can. I think it's important to, as far as advice goes, just to stay inquisitive, curious about the things that you're working on.
[00:13:26] Brittany: That can be really invigorating to some people, “Oh, I found the answer to this one question. And now there's seven other questions that I have like, Ooh, yay, I can't wait to figure this out!” Do you ever have those moments at work?
[00:13:37] Lindsay Gabbert: Definitely. You learn one thing and then it really opens up the door to like, well, what if this? What if that? What else do we need to learn now? Important part of the scientific process.
[00:13:49] Brittany: Do you have any hobbies, or how do you like to unwind after work?
Lindsay Gabbert: Yeah, I have a lot of hobbies. I'm a very outdoorsy person. I have a big vegetable garden. I like to go fishing. So obviously where we're located, there's access to water, the Long Island Sound. I do a lot of fishing, hiking, foraging, that sort of thing. Cooking.
[00:14:11] Brittany: What are you foraging for lately?
[00:14:13] Lindsay Gabbert: I do a lot of mushroom foraging. So that's a side hobby.
[00:14:17] Brittany: Oh, okay. That's, I mean, that's risky business. You've got to really know your stuff in that.
[00:14:22] Lindsay Gabbert: Yeah, I mean, I think it's part of that, the scientist in you wants to learn about stuff and in the natural world and the outdoors and mushrooms are really interesting biologically. It's fun to go out and search for the ones that you want to put on your dinner plate, I guess. I'm probably to the point where I have 10 species that I know a hundred percent and I won't really take anything else but those.
[00:14:47] Brittany: Okay, speaking of mushrooms did you ever watch the Last of Us? It's the whole post-apocalyptic, like, what if mushrooms…?
[00:14:53] Lindsay Gabbert: I think I have, it's like the one, Pedro Pascal, the mushrooms are infecting their brains and they're basically, it's like a zombie mushroom…?
[00:15:03] Brittany: Yeah, exactly. The zombie mushroom situation. What do you think about that scenario?
[00:15:07] Lindsay Gabbert: It's definitely farfetched, but I am a really big fan of like cheesy disaster movies.
[00:15:12] Brittany: Oh, yeah. What's your favorite?
[00:15:15] Lindsay Gabbert: I mean, I guess the classic one would be Twister. Got me started. That's a good one.
[00:15:20] Brittany: How do you determine what animals to study at Plum Island?
[00:15:23] Lindsay Gabbert: The diseases that we work with only infect certain species of animals. So, for example, African Swine Fever, as you could probably tell from the name, infects domestic pigs, but also warthogs, feral swine, different species. So, for us, the most important species is the domestic pig that is used in the field, so, for that virus, obviously, we'd only study that animal. Foot and Mouth Disease virus is a little more complex. It infects cloven hoofed animals. So cattle, bison, sheep, goats, pigs. So, if you're looking at pathogenesis studies for that virus, you may want to include different types of target species that it could infect in the field.
[00:16:15] Brittany: That's a good point. So with these efforts, you wouldn't just be protecting domestic animals, you'd also be protecting wild animals as well.
[00:16:22] Lindsay Gabbert: Yes, that's correct. and if you think of an environment, like, a safari in Africa for example, you're going to have all sorts of different species that are susceptible, and a more well defined area. Something similar in the U. S. could be the wild bison populations, things like that. FMD is an extremely contagious virus, and it spreads very fast. So, the ability to go from wildlife to domestic species is a much higher risk than with other diseases.
[00:16:53] Brittany: Can you take us through what a day in the life is like at Plum Island?
[00:16:57] Lindsay Gabbert: Plum Island is located in the Long Island Sound. It's about a 30-minute ferry ride from Connecticut, about a 10-minute ride from New York, so our staff are able to live in either state, either New York or Connecticut. Basically, get on the ferry about 6 in the morning and head over. A lot of us will walk to the building in the morning. Most of my day is spent in the office, not necessarily the laboratory, writing papers, reports, project management, experiment planning, but a large number of staff do go into the lab, and it's really just like working in a standard microbiology lab. We're provided scrubs and tennis shoes, and we wear those in the lab. There's a lunchroom inside the lab, so everybody can go up and our lunch actually gets sent in from the cafeteria through a box that gets opened, and all of our lunches have our name written on it, and nice little paper bags.
[00:17:55] Brittany: Oh, wow.
[00:17:56] Lindsay Gabbert: Whatever we ordered in the morning. There's coffee in there. We can take a break and go upstairs and get a coffee, and then, kind of a standard workday. Nobody's staying overnight there, so you can either work the early shift or the later shift and then you get on the ferry and you go home.
[00:18:13] Brittany: Is the ferry ever closed down for inclement weather?
[00:18:16] Lindsay Gabbert: It does. It's what we refer to as a weather day. So, kind of like a getting a snow day as a kid, we get a weather day. It's a little bit different now that we're all set up to telework. We still have to work from home, but, generally, if the wave height is to a certain level, or the winds are a certain speed, it will trigger the notification for a weather day. Not so much for snow, but the seas are rough, or it's difficult to get on the boat because of the tides, things like that, we will get to work from home.
[00:18:48] Brittany: Probably fewer pipettes at home, though.
Lindsay Gabbert: Not as much, definitely.
[00:18:52] Brittany: do you ever miss maybe the more hands on, being in the lab work versus, some of the office work that you've been doing lately?
[00:18:59] Lindsay Gabbert: Definitely. I still do a lot of the hands-on work, but generally for a shorter experiment, it's a week of hands-on work, and then four months of analyzing what happened. We've been doing a lot of decontamination research that looks at fogging of laboratory spaces for inactivation of the pathogens we work with, so they're large-scale tests in a big room with hundreds of samples set up. You conduct your experiment, collect all your samples, and then it takes a couple of months to analyze all of those before you get your answer and then can plan the next experiment.
[00:19:35] Brittany: Are there any stories you can share of crises averted or, feelings like, Ooh, dodged a bullet there.
[00:19:43] Lindsay Gabbert: well, I did flood the lab one time.
Brittany: Please say more.
[00:19:47] Lindsay Gabbert: I left the water on overnight.
[00:19:50] Brittany: Oh, no.
[00:19:50] Lindsay Gabbert: Went home, I was working late, and I left the water on and I came back in the morning to, I want to say unhappy, but, there was some questions for me when I got there the next day. I guess the security officer that was doing his round saw water coming out from underneath one of the lab doors going into the hallway.
[00:20:11] Brittany: They want to know why is this pool here? Who installed that?
[00:20:14] Lindsay Gabbert: Sometimes we cause the crisis ourselves.
[00:20:17] Brittany: I bet cleanup was fun for that.
[00:20:18] Lindsay Gabbert: yes.
[00:20:19] Brittany: Are there any examples that we can look to, to see what life is like without this work? Where maybe these diseases aren't as well controlled as they are here.
[00:20:28] Lindsay Gabbert: Yeah, I think we can take African Swine Fever as a good example. The ASF outbreak started in Asia, and spread very quickly through China and now Southeast Asia. Basically resulted in the death of, I think the figure is one out of every four pigs on the planet.
[00:20:49] Brittany: Wow.
[00:20:49] Lindsay Gabbert: And since then, it has most recently been detected in Dominican Republic. I think that's the closest that it's been to the US in 40 years. So that really kind of inspired, especially the U.S. to ramp up their defenses and take more action. I mean, a flight from Dominican Republic to the U.S. or Miami could be here in no time at all. And it really kind of opened people's eyes that things can change very quickly.
[00:21:17] Brittany: Yeah. I mean, it sounds like this just has the potential to completely ravage populations of animals because it, it moves very quickly, doesn't it?
[00:21:25] Lindsay Gabbert: It's not as contagious as some other animal diseases, but it moves quickly because we move quickly. So, transportation of infected animals that may not be displaying symptoms of disease is definitely a component, but these viruses can survive in food products. So, pork products that come into the country, either legally or illegally…if you've flown internationally from any country near an ASF outbreak, you're going to get questioned when you come back through immigration. Do you have any pork products? Have you been on farms? Those sort of things. It's really kind of an all hands response with Customs and Border Protection, at the airports, immigration, APHIS. Everybody has to work together to come up with the rules and policies to keep these diseases from entering the U.S.
[00:22:16] Brittany: Good point, because it's not just about we want to make sure you're not bringing your lunch here just to make you hungry on the airplane. There's a reason because some of these food products could transmit unintentionally, really devastating diseases.
[00:22:29] Lindsay Gabbert: Correct, and I know certain countries, require if you've been to a foot and mouth disease positive country, you have to disinfect your shoes.
[00:22:37] Brittany: Oh, wow.
[00:22:38] Lindsay Gabbert: Through the airport as well.
[00:22:40] Brittany: I didn't know that. Wow. Is there any sort of, public health advice that you wish you could give to people? Like, oh, if we could just get everyone doing this, it'd make your job so much easier?
[00:22:51] Lindsay Gabbert: Well, I guess from a state issue, it'd be that everybody mandated that there was no garbage feeding to animals.
[00:23:00] Brittany: Oh, okay.
[00:23:01] Lindsay Gabbert: If you think about something like a cruise ship, the food waste and things like that, sometimes that gets funneled through the animal feed supply chain.
[00:23:10] Brittany: Oh, wow,
[00:23:11] Lindsay Gabbert: Definitely a big risk there. Some states allow it and other states do not. So, having everybody on the same page for that would be great.
[00:23:19] Brittany: Are there any things that you've discovered in your work at Plum Island that do apply to humans?
[00:23:24] Lindsay Gabbert: I mean, a lot of the studies we do with viruses can be applied to multiple viruses. Something that infects a human or something that infects an animal. We're really looking a lot at virus survival. How long can this agent survive on a surface? What can we do to inactivate it? So really those sorts of discoveries and knowledge translate very well to things that infect humans also.
[00:23:49] Brittany: Can you tell us more about the 1918 flu? Was it a swine flu or what caused it?
[00:23:55] Lindsay Gabbert: I believe it was a bird flu. Flu viruses are really interesting because they have the capacity to infect multiple species, so you have a swine flu, a bird flu, a human flu, and they can all kind of mix and match their genetic components and hop from species to species very quickly. So, we're seeing right now with the outbreak of bird flu in cattle, that's something that we've never seen before. Bird flu also causes mass die-offs of marine mammals, so seals and walruses, especially in South America. Definitely something that's very interesting, and we still need to keep an eye on.
[00:24:35] Brittany: When you read something like that in the news, do you think, oh, this is going to show up maybe on my desk here in a few months?
[00:24:41] Lindsay Gabbert: Well, luckily, there's plenty of labs in the U. S. that can work with influenza. They don't require, a stringent environment like at Plum Island, so we generally don't do any work with flu. I think we stay really up to date on the latest and greatest outbreaks that are happening everywhere. And we attend a lot of conferences and international seminars where we hear what is happening in England, Australia, South Africa. How many monkey pox cases did they have that month? That sort of a thing. So we can be prepared and know what could be on our doorstep next.
[00:25:22] Brittany: Can you tell us a little bit more about growing up in the Midwest? A little bit more about you?
[00:25:25] Yeah. So, I grew up in Minnesota. It's where most of my family still lives. I got my bachelor's degree at Hamlin University at St. Paul, Minnesota -Biology, Environmental Science. Spent a lot of time camping, hiking, out in the woods, fishing, that sort of thing. Really great state, except for the winters.
Brittany: Well, no one's perfect.
[00:25:49] Lindsay Gabbert: I worked at a car wash for 6 years,
[00:25:52] Brittany: Really?
[00:25:53] Lindsay Gabbert: All through high school and college, that was my job, working at the car wash.
[00:25:59] Brittany: Probably a lot of insight into some different decontamination and, not sterile environments, when you're washing some of those cars.
[00:26:07] Lindsay Gabbert: Probably that job resulted, there was a request from someone in APHIS, they wanted to test a mobile decontamination car wash that they had.
[00:26:22] Brittany: Oh, wow.
[00:26:23] Lindsay Gabbert: So they needed somebody to fly out to Wisconsin and put biological agents on the vehicles and then collect them after they went through the car wash to determine whether, it was effective or not. I was volun-told for that job, so my car wash days did come in handy for something.
[00:26:43] Brittany: See, and that's great advice to all the little kids out there. It's like, hey, you're working your summer jobs, you never know when this is going to come back and come in handy. Whatever happened with that mobile decontamination unit?
[00:26:55] Lindsay Gabbert: I believe it was being funded through the DHS, the small business, SBIR. I forget the rest of the acronym, grant program…
[00:27:03] Brittany: Small Business Innovation Research.
[00:27:04] Lindsay Gabbert: Thank you. I'm not sure exactly what whatever happened, but I do know that I was able to recover quite a bit of the microorganisms we were looking at, so it didn't wash them all off.
[00:27:16] Brittany: Oh no! further testing is needed. How common is it for diseases to cross over between species? We hear about swine flu. You mentioned that flu is pretty easy to cross over between species, but how often does that happen with some of these other diseases?
[00:27:31] Lindsay Gabbert: I think the figure is like, 75 percent of all diseases of humans were once in animals.
[00:27:38] Brittany: Wow.
[00:27:39] Lindsay Gabbert: So, a lot of diseases. We can take MERS, for example. MERS, something that only infected camels, and now as people, as viruses move through the environment, and come in contact with new hosts, they mutate, and they change. Sometimes it's a good fit and sometimes it's not. It basically relies on the ability to enter the cells of that host. So, if they don't have the right proteins, or receptors, or mechanism, it's never going to be a fit. But if it's close, then maybe they adapt a little bit and can jump species. But it really relates to our encroaching in new areas, contacting new animals or environments, bugs, mosquitoes, things that we haven't been around before, gives those viruses an opportunity to infect a new host. A virus doesn't want to kill its hosts. It wants to keep you alive as long as possible so that it can replicate and produce offspring. So, generally, if something that primarily infects an animal gets into a human, the human dies, it's a dead-end host. So that's a bad match up. You really want an environment that allows that virus to create progeny and go on to infect others.
[00:28:57] Brittany: It is nice hearing the virus perspective represented. They're so often, overlooked.
[00:29:03] Lindsay Gabbert: Well, and viruses can't move. They're not seeking out anybody, they're funneled through the environment by our movement, so a cough or contaminated food or an animal, they're not seeking us out intentionally.
[00:29:20] Brittany: So how does the virus change? How does it do that over time when it's, it's not sentient, it's not actively choosing things? I wonder if you could tell us more about that process.
[00:29:32] Lindsay Gabbert: So when a virus infects a host, it's replicating itself within the cells. That's what causes the disease. That replication process is really kind of messy, it makes a lot of errors. So basically, when a host is infected, you have what's called a viral quasi species. It's multiple strains of the same virus within that host. And the ones that survive and move forward are the ones that are most well-tailored to that individual. You could have a flu virus that infects a barn with a million chickens and the virus that comes out on the other side isn't exactly the same as the one that went in. It's now adapted to that host, and the same thing using flu as an example again, but if you have human workers that are in that environment with all the birds, that flu virus isn't very well tailored to them. But if they do get infected, the cough that comes out of their mouth, that virus population may be more well suited to humans now than it was from the bird that they got it from. I guess you could say that, the design of how the virus replicates is meant to be messy because it gives them a better opportunity for surviving if there's a diversity within their sequence or structure.
[00:30:52] Brittany: So it's sort of like the, process of evolution, but on a very small scale within a single organism. Another smaller organism is trying out tons of different options just to see what's going to stick with the next host.
[00:31:05] Lindsay Gabbert: Yeah, basically it is a form of evolution on a very small scale, like you said.
[00:31:11] Brittany: And that's why containment efforts are so important, making sure that we stay ahead of potential changes in that outbreak. I understand Plum Island has vaccines available so that if an outbreak were identified, okay, we can quickly ramp up and make sure that we can maybe inoculate, you know, surrounding populations. How do you think about those potential changes in the disease, and maybe African Swine Fever and Foot and Mouth disease don't change as quickly, but how do you prepare for those from a public a response posture?
[00:31:43] Lindsay Gabbert: So, in the US, there's the North American Animal Vaccine Bank, and also the Foot and Mouth Disease Vaccine Bank, which are both maintained to contain doses of vaccine specifically for animal diseases, Foot and Mouth disease virus. I'm not a part of that team, but I know there's tons of risk analysis that goes into figuring out which vaccines we should keep on hand. If there is an outbreak, they look at the strains of viruses that are circulating globally, trying to determine which ones are highest probability that could show up in the U.S., to make sure we have vaccines that are matched for that strain. So, for FMD, there's multiple serotypes where the vaccines aren't necessarily cross protective.
[00:32:32] Brittany: Oh, okay.
[00:32:32] Lindsay Gabbert: So, you have to match the vaccine to the exact strain of virus that would be circulating. They analyze which ones are in these countries, which ones should we keep stocks of, to make sure that they're prepared in the event that there is a disease outbreak.
[00:32:49] Brittany: Very similar to what we see each year with the flu vaccine. There's somebody in the lab saying “This is probably the most likely strain. This is the one we should, mass produce.” It's interesting to think those conversations are happening for diseases that will, knock on wood, hopefully stay out of the U.S.
[00:33:05] Lindsay Gabbert: Foot and Mouth disease there are effective vaccines available, but for African Swine Fever there is no licensed vaccine that would be available to be used in the US. So that's why studying things like biosecurity and virus survival, how can we minimize the impact that we move the virus around, is really important.
[00:33:27] Brittany: Definitely. Are there any diseases that you're particularly excited about? Maybe just from a purely intellectual perspective, like what's your favorite disease?
[00:33:35] Lindsay Gabbert: Tick diseases are really interesting. So if you've heard of Lone Star tick, and they cause Alpha Gal syndrome, which is you become allergic to red meat.
[00:33:46] Brittany: Okay, that is my husband's like deepest, darkest fear at this point.
[00:33:50] Lindsay Gabbert: So, like, that's really interesting, and kudos to the doctor that made that connection of a patient that had a meat allergy and got bit by a tick six months previously. That's real detective work right there.
[00:34:05] Brittany: That's a very thorough questionnaire, a very nice long visit with your doctor to figure out. I was bit by a tick months ago and that's why I suddenly can't eat red meat. What's the weirdest question you get from people when they find out that you work from Plum Island? Present company included.
[00:34:19] Lindsay Gabbert: Do you glow in the dark?
[00:34:21] Brittany: Wow. And I'm guessing you don't.
[00:34:24] Lindsay Gabbert: Not that I'm aware of, no, but I've definitely been asked that multiple times.
[00:34:29] Brittany: Thank you for being with us here today, Lindsay. It's been so wonderful talking to you, we really appreciate you taking the time to join us on the podcast.
[00:34:35] Lindsay Gabbert: Thank you so much for having me.
[00:34:37] Dave: Thank you for listening to Technologically Speaking. To learn more about what you've heard in this episode, check out the show notes on our website, and follow us on Apple Podcasts and YouTube, and on social media at DHS SciTech. D H S S C I T E C H. Bye!