BEDFORD -- Joel Montgomery spends most of his time working with his team of epidemiologists to suppress outbreaks of dengue fever and Rift Valley fever in Kenya.
"Both are mosquito-borne diseases that can be fatal," Montgomery said. "We're concerned about Rift Valley fever getting to the U.S., because it can infect cattle."But on a recent trip to Bedford, Montgomery focused his attention on a virus that's been a problem in North Texas this year -- West Nile -- and found potential villains in his mother's backyard pond."It's full of mosquito larvae," he said. "I can't leave it like this."Montgomery, a graduate of L.D. Bell High School and the University of Texas at Arlington, is now back at work in Africa, where he was recently named director of the Global Disease Detection center and the International Emerging Infections Program in Nairobi, Kenya.He is charged with tracking down diseases and preventing them from coming to the United States, a job that has been glamorized in Richard Preston's true-story Hot Zone, which tracks the Ebola virus from the African rain forest to the U.S., and the movie Contagion, where epidemiologists chase a lethal pandemic.The recent promotion makes Montgomery even more important to the global mission, said Frederick Angulo, chief of Global Disease Detection in CDC's Atlanta headquarters."His current position ... involves massive responsibilities and public health impact," Angulo said in an e-mail.Montgomery leads a team of 222 professionals and oversees a $12 million budget for seven programs in Kenya. The promotion wasn't a reward so much as an acknowledgement of Montgomery's abilities, Angulo said."I have supervised many officers over my 26 years at CDC and I confirm that he is one of the very best," he said.'Picking up bugs'Nothing that's happened since Montgomery's first step on his career path as a UT Arlington student in the late 1990s surprised his mother, Alta Montgomery."He showed this kind of interest from when he was very young," she said. "We all went camping often and Joel was always picking up bugs, frogs, snakes, anything."What turned her son to epidemiology was meeting Professor George Stewart during his last years at UT Arlington."Epidemiology was his specialty and Joel just followed him into it," she said.And for most of that journey, Montgomery's wife, Kim, also followed."Kim adjusts to anywhere they live," Alta Montgomery said. "She also knows that traveling is his job."The two have a son and daughter -- Van, 7, and Bella, 3.Over his career with the CDC, the 43-year-old Montgomery has helped track down the sources and interrupt the spread of diseases all over the world."I haven't worked an Ebola virus outbreak yet," he said. "Maybe in Uganda soon."But he has chased rabies in Peru, hantavirus in Bolivia and West Virginia, Marburg hemorrhagic fever in Angola, Monkey pox in Ghana and Texas, and SARS in Vietnam.Even before severe acute respiratory syndrome got its name, Montgomery went to Hanoi in early 2003 as one of dozens of U.S. healthcare workers who helped bring the then-mystery illness under control. After 63 cases and five deaths, Vietnam became the first country to control its SARS outbreak."Things in Hanoi were good when we left," Montgomery told the Star-Telegram then.Bats in BangladeshOne of his most challenging -- and dangerous -- jobs was later that year in Bangladesh, where he and his team had to test seven species of fruit bats to halt a Nipah virus outbreak."We collected about 100 [bats] and did blood tests and necropsies to confirm the infection source," he said. "The culprit was pteropus giganteus."Known as the Indian flying fox, the world's largest bat species has a body the size of a standard dachshund and a wingspan of five feet or more.Montgomery had been called in to find out why dozens of people in a handful of neighboring Bangladesh villages were dying from a respiratory illness.Working day and night they caught bats in "mist nets" made with threads thin enough to thwart the animals' echo-location senses. They climbed into the bats' tree-top roosts to pull them down, or felled them with a 20-gauge shotgun.The task required thick gloves to ward against the bats' long teeth and long sleeves to reduce exposure to whatever fluids they released. Goggles protected the catchers' eyes; light masks, their noses and mouths."It was hot and humid and we worked in a densely forested area surrounded by curious people," Montgomery said. "Bangladesh has 140 to 150 million people in a country about the size of the state of Georgia."The first appearance of Nipah virus -- characterized by inflammation of the brain or respiratory problems -- was a 1999 outbreak among pig farmers in Malaysia, according to the World Health Organization. But in Bangladesh most of those 150 or so million people are Muslim, so pigs aren't in the equation, Montgomery said."We got there about April and started out with a series of interviews, then went out into the villages for detective work," he said. "We interviewed people about what they were doing before they got infected." The responses led the team to the fruit bats.Collected tissues, blood and other fluids that were put into tubes and boxes, subjected to liquid nitrogen and sent to the CDC in Atlanta confirmed what Montgomery's team surmised. But doing away with the bats wasn't an option they wanted locals to consider as a solution."We convinced them to not eat fruit that the bats had bitten, or at least wash it first, ideally with detergent," he said.Managing mosquitoesIronically, discovering the potential West Nile carriers in his mom's pond with only a few hours to get ready for his flight, Montgomery never got around to cleaning it out.Alta Montgomery said she was embarrassed by her son's discovery and took care of it soon after his plane left."I knew they were there," she said. "I'm usually very good about cleaning it out. I usually keep those tabs in there, a larvicide."Lack of larvicide aside, Alta Montgomery said her son long ago showed her another, natural way to control the wigglers."Joel is usually the one who catches minnows in the creek" and puts them in the pond to eat the larvae, she said. "He hasn't been here since July and [the minnows] must have been eaten by the herons who nest in our yard."Terry Evans, 817-390-7620Twitter: @fwstevansHave more to add? News tip? Tell us
