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Sudden celebrity baffles scientist
By BABITA PERSAUD TAMPA -- As an epidemiologist, Jacqueline Cattani has traveled the globe. She has spoken Melanesian pidgin to loinclothed tribesmen in Papua New Guinea, and flown to Yanomami Indian encampments in the Amazon. She has studied snails in China for a project on schistosomiasis, a tropical disease. She has taught at Harvard and worked for the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. She has been to Ghana, Burkina Faso, Gambia and Kenya. Three years ago, she moved to Tampa. Friends asked: What on earth are you going to do there? The answer revealed itself when anthrax was mailed out to several people after the Sept. 11 attacks and Cattani, director of the Center for Biological Defense at the University of South Florida, found herself explaining it to the world. She has been awakened at 1 a.m. for a telephone interview with Irish Radio, and been interviewed by the New York Times, the Toronto Star, NBC, the Christian Science Monitor, the Los Angeles Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer. How Cattani arrived at this point in her life is part skill, part luck. Even she is baffled by it. "You know, I have to ask myself, 'How did I end up in this position, doing this at this time? ' " she said one morning in her book-lined office. Cattani drives a cobalt blue Mazda Miata and wears square, fashionable glasses. In high school, she was not the type to tote a tall stack of books. Like so many people growing up in Southern California, she wanted to be an actor. It was in college, when she joined the Peace Corps, that she got a taste of something global. She worked with fishermen in Venezuela, helping them petition the government to bring electricity to their little coastal town. It was in Venezuela that she fell in love with an optician 15 years her senior. She walked into his shop one day, looking for sunglasses. They began dating and married several years later. He would follow her on many of her adventures, at times giving up his job and helping her with her research in the field. Cattani entered the field of epidemiology after working in clinics in Santa Barbara, Calif., seeing firsthand how disease affected poor Spanish farm workers. Her specialization is not anthrax, but something that has killed far more people worldwide: malaria. A University of California at Berkley professor suggested it might open a career path. He was right. While reading Science magazine one day in the early 1980s, she came across a classified ad for an epidemiologist to work on a malaria project for the Institute of Medical Research in Papua New Guinea. "I don't think either of us (she and her husband) even knew where it was," Cattani said. "We just went." It was when she decided to settle in the Tampa Bay area, where her sister lives, that Cattani bought her first house, in Wesley Chapel, overlooking a preserve. She ran for the Pasco County's Mosquito Control Board, thinking her background would help, but lost. Then she heard about a research job at USF's Biological Defense Lab, which was just getting off the ground. The center is one of the few in the country aimed at countering the use by terrorists of disease-spreading micro-organisms or toxins. It links firefighters, doctors and police with universities and state officials. The Florida Department of Health shares the building and plays a major role in the research. Other Florida universities studying bioterrorism, including the University of Florida, also play a role. The lab is working on a way to detect anthrax in a fraction of the time it now takes. Currently, it can take up to 72 hours. "What we are working on is a test that will tell us in a half-hour to four hours," Cattani said.
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