“Science is a verb.” that is what science teachers tell their students, and this book describes just that. I found the book to be an exciting collection of seven scientists doing their jobs, and sometimes I was jealous. As scientist, Marta Guerra, describes, “for people who like to do fairly exciting things… you feel like you are actually helping people, [disease hunting in Uganda] is a wonderful experience.” The book is scientifically accurate, and, with a bird flu expert hinting about new emerging pandemics, the book is very current. It is engaging and packed with a great deal of information. The Levels of Containment that we often read about describes measles as a level two disease, where gloves, face protection, gowns, and splash guards are used. It is a good thing that our mothers never knew that. For your information, E. coli is only level one. If you did not know what bat guano is, the explanation is seamlessly woven into the text. Zoonotic is a word I have been hearing more about, and this book teaches young readers what it means: diseases that can be transmitted between animals and humans. Scientist Laurie Richardson says that “being a scientist is like being a kid all you life” because there is so much fun and learning to do. Scientist Jonathan Runstadler’s job is to track the bird flu. To do that, he swabs bird bottoms, which may not sound like fun, but, for people such as me, it beats sitting in a cubical working on spreadsheets. This is a great read. Reviewer: RevaBeth Russell

Still, I’ve grabbed a few minute this evening to post a few things.

First, here’s some video of me winning the Aurora Award for Marseguro, courtesy of of Neo-Opsis Science Fiction editor Karl Johanson (who won one himself that evening):

A couple of additional stories on the win showed up in the media in addition to the ones I mentioned in previous posts. Here’s the Regina LeaderPost‘s story (which got picked up Global TV and other components of the CanWest conglomerate), and here’s one from the weekly newspaper I once worked for as a reporter/photographer and eventually news editor, The Weyburn Review.

I’d like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that there is also a sequel to Marseguro, entitled Terra Insegura. Oh, and look, here’s a review!

From Fantasy & SciFi Lovin’ News & Reviews:

Terra Insegura is an action-packed thrill-ride that outshines its predecessor…Plot twists, surprise characters, and well-drawn action make this novel both enjoyable and a prime example of why science fiction is still awesome. I find it difficult to complain about this novel, because I had problems putting it down. Terra Insegura has just enough action to keep me fixed to the page, and plenty of suspense (and even a little romance) to make this more than just another book of explosions and space battles. It’s a novel that knows it is good science fiction and isn’t afraid to show it…science fiction at its best.

I think the reviewer liked it.

Not sure that it means much in the big scheme of things, but I also discovered that Terra Insegura just missed making Locus Magazine‘s August bestsellers’ list; they mention it as “the new runner-up.” Maybe it’ll make it in September.

Meanwhile, some people are just now reading Marseguro. From the LiveJournal My Den:

This was an excellent read. It has action, murderous cultists, an airhead who becomes a resistance fighter and a brainwashed murderous clerk who becomes a hero. It is a fascinating universe that Willett has created and I intend to read the sequel as soon as possible.

Others prefer to judge a book by its cover. On the theory that all publicity is good publicity, here’s a link so you can listen in to the commentors at Good Show Sir! react to the Marseguro cover (which I still like. So there!).

Finally, as a reminder that I also write non-fiction, here’s a review of my book Disease-Hunting Scientist from the National Science Teachers’ Association NSTA Recommends website, by third-grade teacher Jacqueline Pfeiffer:

I couldn’t put this book down, and neither will your students. What an impetus to do more research and reading!…

The publishers say the book is for readers in grades five and up or ages 10 and up. The reading flows so easily that I believe younger students who have an interest in science would enjoy the book as well. I highly recommend this book for students who want to explore scientific fields.

Very nice!

In the movie Outbreak, researchers from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have to figure out how to stop a kind of super-Ebola virus from ravaging the U.S.

In 1995, the same year Outbreak came out, Marta Guerra, who already had her Doctor of Veterinary Medicine degree and was finishing her master’s degree in public health. “I remember seeing that movie and thinking, ‘Wow, that’s what I want to do!’”

Five years later, Guerra, now with a Ph.D. in epidemiology and a brand-new officer of the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) of the CDC, received orders to head out on her first international mission: to study and combat an outbreak in Uganda of Ebola virus.

She joined a team in Lacor, Uganda, working in a laboratory set up at St. Mary’s Hospital, a private hospital which had much more advanced equipment than the local government-run hospital-equipment that allowed them to diagnose people with Ebola in less than 24 hours.

Accurate, fast diagnosis was important not only to identify Ebola patients but also to allow those who didn’t have the disease to be sent home, minimizing their risk of exposure.

Guerra’s tasks included tracking the spread of the disease, identifying those who had been exposed, and educating the public.

Every day team members would go to the government-run hospital and get the list of people who were newly admitted and/or diagnosed. “Then we would go out to the person’s home and make a list of contacts. Those contacts would have to be visited for 21 days. If there was anyone that appeared to be unhealthy or developing any kind of symptoms, then we would call in to the hospital to bring an ambulance out.” The effort involved 150 trained volunteers.

Over the course of the outbreak, 5,600 people who had been in contact with infected patients were identified and observed.

Although the Ugandan government had done a “wonderful job” educating people about HIV, Guerra says, the lessons learned regarding HIV actually made it harder to deal with Ebola. Whereas people who test positive for HIV remain infected for life, people who recover from Ebola are no longer contagious and are also protected from the disease in the future.

Because of what they’d learned about HIV, people thought that anyone with antibodies to Ebola was contagious and was dangerous to have around. “We’d find [survivors] totally by themselves, without food, because nobody wanted to share their food with them, allow them to use any dishes, anything.”

To counteract that, “I would definitely go up and touch them, or try to show them that I was not scared to be around them. I always ended up giving them some money so they could get food at least for a week to be able to buy some pots and pans and some things to sleep on, because some of them were not being allowed to come back to their families.”

Most people in the area would first be cared for by family members when they became ill, Guerra explains. After that, they would probably turn to traditional healers rather than trying to get to a probably distant clinic. That led to tragedies like the death of all four sisters in one family.

Team members urged the locals to go to a clinic as soon as they felt ill. “If it was malaria, then good, you got your treatment early,” Guerra would tell them, while if it was Ebola, the patient could quickly be isolated and supportive care begun.

The researchers, who knew what precautions to take, weren’t particularly concerned about contracting the disease. They were more worried about the risk of violence.

 ”We were in the territory of the Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda. A lot of people had been displaced up there, a lot of people kidnapped and killed.”

In the end, though, Guerra’s team saw nothing of the rebels. “I think they were also very scared of the Ebola outbreak,” she says, and with good reason: it killed 225 people before being brought under control

Despite the difficulties and dangers, Guerra calls the experience “just wonderful.”

“There are still chances to go out there and help people who are in a very disadvantaged state,” she says. “There are still chances to go out there and do investigations.”

Dr. Laurie Richardson, Professor of Biology at Florida International University in Miami, is researching black-band disease in coral reefs—which means she spends a lot of each summer scuba-diving, often for hours a day.

At 287,231 square kilometers, coral reefs are less than a tenth of a percent of the total ocean floor. But they support more than a million species of marine life. They are also dying, from pollution, overfishing—and black-band disease, among others.

Dr. Richardson started her career researching “microbial mats,” communities of microbes that live in the sulfur-rich water of hot springs. She then worked in Wisconsin on a NASA project that used satellite data in the study of aquatic ecosystems. That led to three years at NASA’s Ames Research Centre in California learning remote sensing and image processing, which in turn landed her in Florida with a NASA-funded grant to work on algal pigments and remote sensing.

One day, while she was diving for fun on a coral reef, somebody showed her an example of black-band disease-and she immediately recognized it as similar to the microbial communities she’d studied in hot-spring outflows.

She looked in the scientific literature, and no one else had made that connection. And that was how the research she’s now been doing for more than 15 years began.

Like most scientists, Richardson spends most of her time writing papers and proposals, teaching, or in her laboratory, but about ten percent of the time, mostly in the summer, you can find her diving with graduate students, undergraduate students, and research collaborators, collecting samples and monitoring the progress of disease on the reef.

Coral samples are taken with numbered, sterilized syringes. The divers record on underwater slates the number of the syringe, what the sample is, and a description of the diseased coral. Evenings of the ten-day-long diving expeditions are typically spent transcribing information from the underwater slates into a database or field notebook.

Most of the time the diving itself is fun. But not always. On one occasion, Richardson suffered the bends (an extremely painful condition caused by bubbles of dissolved nitrogen forming in the bloodstream as the diver surfaces). On another, a sudden strong underwater surge reduced visibility to nothing and threatened to sweep her and her students away from the boat into the Gulf Stream.

Corals consist of an extremely thin layer of living tissue (often less than a millimeter thick) over a rock-like skeleton of calcium carbonate. A lot of bacteria live in association with the coral’s surface and can cause a really nasty infection in any cut. Fortunately, Richardson has avoided that particular hazard so far.

As for black-band disease, Richardson says it’s now like a jigsaw puzzle that is maybe seven-eighths of the way filled in. “Anything we figure out now is one more piece of the puzzle, so that is really exciting.”

She’s figured out that as the disease-causing community of bacteria (dominated by blue-green algae) first grows, it consumes the available oxygen, opening the door for another group of bacteria that thrive in an oxygen-free environment, instead using sulfate dissolved in the water. Those bacteria produce sulfide gas as waste, killing coral tissue, which is then devoured by additional bacteria.

Contributing to the problem: a warming ocean. Corals like warm water, but not too warm. For microorganisms, on the other hand, the warmer, the better. As a result, the growth of bacteria and blue-green algae “takes off like a rocket” at the same time that the corals they are living on become stressed. The result is disease.

Richardson’s work may also shed light on human diseases, because many human diseases are also caused by a community of bacteria. In fact, her current funding is from the National Institutes of Health.

And finally, it’s a wonderful teaching model. “I’m a biology professor, and my students are learning all about ecology and physiology and microbiology and molecular genetics while they’re out there in this incredible environment working on the reef.”