A personal story: Focus on bioterrorism raises scientist's profile

By Edie Lau -- Bee Science Writer
Published 2:15 a.m. PDT Sunday, Sept. 8, 2002

	As the bioterrorism coordinator for the Sacramento County Public Health Laboratory, Sandra Tougaw doesn't usually wear a lab coat to work now, but she donned one in a bit of nostalgia. Sacramento Bee/Manny Crisostomo

Two years ago, when Sandra Tougaw's boss asked her if she'd like to be the bioterrorism coordinator for the Sacramento County Public Health Laboratory, Tougaw hesitated.

Was this an area worth spending time and energy on? Tougaw, a microbiologist with 28 years in public health, wasn't sure.

Ultimately, she decided the issue was worthwhile. She did not, however, foresee how quickly its relevance and profile would rise.

One year into the job, Tougaw and her colleagues found themselves laboring into the night checking white powders submitted to authorities by local people fearful that they were victims of the bioterrorist anthrax attack that hit the nation Oct. 4.

If the public was stunned by the turn of events, so were many of the scientists who responded.

Kenneth Takata, chief of the county lab, said that when the state in 2000 offered the lab about $60,000 for bioterrorism preparedness, he thought, "Well, this is never going to happen. This is easy money!"

But it was not so easy after all.

Nowadays, all the staff microbiologists take turns being on call in case another scare happens. And no one is in it thicker than Tougaw, who has become the regional expert that hospitals and laboratories in much of Northern California tap for information.

Until now, Tougaw had spent much of her time in the Sacramento lab working with the germs that cause sexually transmitted diseases.

Now she's working with the likes of Bacillus anthracis (the bug that causes anthrax) and Yersinia pestis (the bug that causes plague).

She no longer works directly with these microbes, either, but instead learns how to identify them and shares what she learns.

She sums up the before-and-after: "I was in lab coats; now I'm in (street) clothes."

Her pay is the same - about $56,000 a year. So far, the lab funds its bioterror program with the same $60,000 a year the state first offered, though Takata said he soon expects an infusion of $290,000 from the federal government to pay for new equipment and another scientist.

Since the anthrax scare has eased, Tougaw spends much of her time at the computer, communicating by e-mail. She's trained microbiologists over the Internet and has created simple one-page laminated guides to help identify top bioterror germs.

One guide explains that Bacillus anthracis grows rapidly, forming colonies in 18 to 24 hours at 35 degrees Celsius. Seen individually, the bacteria form large rods; en masse, they look like ground glass.

Though it angers Tougaw to think that someone would deliberately try to sicken or kill others, her work doesn't get her down.

"You still have to have faith," she said, "in the goodness of most people."