Water harvesting warning
Jamaicans cautioned over lepto threat from stored runoffs
Published:Monday | April 29, 2024 | 12:06 AMAinsworth Morris/Staff Reporter
As some sections of the island experience drought conditions, Paul Brown, professor of molecular biology at The University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, is warning that leptospirosis can still be caught from the storage of water.
“Water is important for lepto. We did a study across surface waters locally. It was a snapshot study. We didn’t find any organisms … but we know once there is run-off from farms or other places, then that water can become infectious, and that has actually happened,” Brown said.
“But in households that had cases, water that is harvested can be something that is infectious, so we found a small number of water samples that persons caught up [which] ran off from the roof, etc, that had organisms in there … . It seems to be a stronger case for those persons who are in rural communities as compared to urban communities,” he said.
Brown was speaking during the inaugural Professorial Lecture titled ‘Genes and Shorts: Lepto and Other Stories, through Molecular Lenses’, held at The UWI, Mona, earlier this month at the Sir Kenneth Standard Lecture Theatre.
Leptospirosis was first identified in Jamaica in 1953.
Linked to climate
Brown also said that the virus can be carried by rats, bats, mongooses, house mice, livestock, and humans and is highly linked to climate.
“Rats get a bad rap! If we kill all the rats, we will still have lepto!” Brown shouted.
He warned that climate variables can cause leptospirosis as well.
“If La Niña is here, [it] means that we get more cases earlier because there is earlier rainfall in this period that we call the dry season, so it is actually not looking good,” he said.
Brown said previous studies he did with leptospirosis in Jamaica, unhealthy behaviours, younger age, lower education, limited knowledge base about leptospirosis, stray dogs, rodents, and maintenance issues were some of the challenges that were faced at the time he did his study.
He said that with John Lindo and other collaborators, he studied one of Jamaica’s more significant outbreaks, and they examined about 3,500 cases and they found, “expectedly”, a high proportion of them with dengue, but also “about six per cent of them were positive for leptospirosis”, which means that they were having an active case.
“We have problems in Jamaica. We have some serious problems, and it has to do with how persons use personal-protective equipment. So many of these have them hung up, and they were in the carcasses with their bare hands [and] bare feet, and these were meats that were going to be for consumption,” Brown said.
“The challenge is that some of these animals were actually positive for lepto,” he said.
Brown warned that another aspect of the disease is that if you don’t look for it, you may miss it.
“When a sample [is] taken for dengue [for example], it is not going to be investigated for lepto or anything else. They don’t find dengue, they didn’t have dengue,” he said.
Brown added that based on his studies, leptospirosis can make its own attachment even if you remove the usual means for it to attach to cells.
“For an orgasm to cause disease, it must attach to a surface and uses various receptors that are on the surface. We [had] enzymes to cut those off, and the organism was still attaching, albeit lower, so it means that it is able to build its own scaffold to effect binding and infection” he explained.
Brown’s foundations in microbiology in the Department of Basic Medical Sciences in Biochemistry has his role at The UWI, Mona’s Faculty of Science and Technology incorporated in it.
He has blazed the trail on significant research endeavours in medicine and the physical sciences. His work, including the impact of climate change on leptospirosis and environmental factors that precipitate increased risks of leptospirosis, has helped to advance the understanding of the health implications of climate change and other factors.
His focus on molecular biology in relation to pathogens is widely recognised, and his accession to the rank of professor in the field is celebrated at The UWI, Mona.
He also studied HIV cases while he was in Barbados from 1993 and 1997, and during his presentation, gave credit to professors Errol Morrison, George Nicholson, and Eccleston Keane.