Rocky Mountain spotted fever killed scientist looking for vaccine – 06/16/2023 – Science

November 6, 1935 marked the end of a scientific drama that had been closely followed by the São Paulo press. One week after the manifestation of the first symptoms of the disease known today as Rocky Mountain spotted fever, the doctor José Lemos Monteiro, a specialist at the Butantan Institute who had contracted the disease precisely while trying to produce a vaccine against it, died.

“He was portrayed as a benefactor, a hero, within the somewhat romantic view of science at that time”, says biologist Carlos Jared, who is now a researcher at Butantan working in the building named in honor of Lemos Monteiro. “The commotion was huge.” An example of this is the dramatic tone of the tribute published in his honor in Volume 10 of the journal Memórias do Instituto Butantan, corresponding to the years 1935 and 1936: “He disappeared among the living, going to occupy a prominent place among the martyrs of science”.

The trajectory of Lemos Monteiro, who was part of the institute’s team of scientists since 1919 and died at the age of 42, shows how Rocky Mountain spotted fever and the ticks that transmit it have never ceased to be a difficult problem to face, despite their relative rarity. of the cases.

The events that led to the infection that killed both the doctor and, a few days earlier, his assistant Edson Dias are not entirely clear. A prolific researcher, Lemos Monteiro had already worked with much more transmissible infectious diseases, such as smallpox, whooping cough and tuberculosis. In 1933, he began working on a committee of the Department of Health of the State of São Paulo that aimed to create ways to prevent Rocky Mountain spotted fever.

“Like today, cases were sporadic, but the concern was with the very high lethality of the disease”, explains Marcelo Labruna, who studies the cycle of the disease in ticks and animals as a researcher at USP’s Faculty of Veterinary Medicine and Zootechnics. “If today it is around 50%, at the beginning of the last century it was around 80%.”

One of Lemos Monteiro e Dias’ goals was to produce a vaccine against the disease. Probably, according to Carlos Jared, the idea was to use the transmitting ticks themselves, crushed in the laboratory, in the production of immunization against bacteria of the genus rickettsia.

This is where the doubts begin. The contemporary document from Butantan only says that the two researchers ended up getting sick when they crushed the contaminated ticks. It is not said, however, how the transmission of the bacteria happened. “There is a risk, when handling this material, of producing aerosols [partículas em suspensão no ar] able to carry the bacteria”, explains Labruna. Other possibilities would be the contact of fragments of the ticks with small wounds on the hands, or the hands that manipulated the invertebrates with their eyes.

“Until that moment there was almost no care with biosafety. The case ended up influencing the introduction of this type of precaution in research of the type in Butantan and in the rest of Brazil”, says the researcher.

Due to the high fatality rate at the time, infected scientists treated the infection as a kind of death sentence. The two’s symptoms were detailed in the daily press, which followed the drama. “There was a belief that if the person survived ten days of symptoms, he would be cured, a very common idea also for other diseases in the case of doctors at the time. But that did not match reality”, says Jared.

The Butantan researcher also points out that, probably for reasons of class, the posthumous tributes were concentrated on the figure of Lemos Monteiro, often leaving aside his colleague Dias, “seen as a mere laboratory technician”.

A vaccine would only come in the 1960s, but without much success. “Due to the bacteria’s virulence, a lot of formaldehyde was used to inactivate it, which made the vaccine very toxic. And the efficacy was not so high either”, says Labruna. Production ceased in the 1980s, as treating the infection with antibiotics was much simpler and more effective, as long as it was done in time.