COLORFUL CAREER: Joe Vinetz and friends
take a break outside his laboratory in Iquitos, Peru.
Joe Vinetz got hooked on his specialty when
he studied microbiology and infectious diseases.
“It was kind of gross with puss and worms
and all that,” he says “so, it’s a perfect
career.”
Vinetz, a UCSD associate professor of medicine,
has become one of a handful of American “malariaologists,” who
have extended their research programs to developing countries
that suffer from malaria—the second largest killer worldwide.
Recently, Vinetz received a $750,000 international research-training
grant from the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Fogarty
Center for Global Infectious Diseases for a program in the Peruvian
Amazon. Epidemic malaria has rapidly emerged in the Peruvian
Amazon, increasing 50-fold from 1992 to 1997. Vinetz first visited
Peru in 1998 and now spends about two months a year in his state-of-the-art
laboratory in Iquitos, where he studies malaria and other infectious
diseases with a group of 20 Peruvian researchers and collaborators.
Vinetz first became interested in malaria as
a Howard Hughes Medical Institute-NIH Research Scholar in the
Laboratory of Parasitic Diseases, where he also discovered an
otherwise forgotten infectious disease called leptospirosis in
one of his patients. In 1996, the research paper he co-authored
describing sporadic urban leptospirosis was published in the
Annals of Internal Medicine.
Leptospirosis is transmitted from infected
mammals, both wild and domestic, to humans via infected urine.
It is primarily an occupational disease that affects farmers,
veterinarians and sewer workers and, if left untreated, can cause
kidney damage, meningitis, liver failure and respiratory distress.
Today, Vinetz continues his studies of leptospirosis, not only
in his laboratory at UCSD but also in his field laboratory in
the Peruvian Amazon.
It may be a long way from pristine La Jolla
to the jungle laboratory in Iquitos, but Vinetz is happy to go
where his research leads him.
— Sue Pondrom
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