Going Viral
WHAT IS IT LIKE TO WALK INTO THE DEADLIEST Ebola outbreak since the disease was first discovered in 1976? “It’s preparing for battle, knowing that every 15 minutes you can make a difference,” says Kilmarx, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) director of Zimbabwe who is on call to help manage health outbreaks across the region. Last fall he was the CDC’s response team leader in Sierra Leone, where the first laboratory-confirmed case of Ebola occurred in March 2014, and last winter he spent a month in Guinea as the CDC’s principal deputy there.
More than 10,000 people have since died of the disease in those countries and Liberia, but it’s only the latest health threat he’s faced in the region, where most of his career has been dedicated to fighting HIV/AIDS. “With Ebola we have the opportunity to put the genie back in the bottle. If we work really hard, we can stop this transmission,” he says. “With HIV/AIDS, it’s too late. It’s by far the biggest cause of mortality in Zimbabwe. There are 100 people dying per day.” Today Kilmarx oversees seven American and 25 local staff in Zimbabwe and works to establish health systems and training programs. After graduating from Dartmouth Kilmarx put off medical school to join the Peace Corps. For two years he lived in a remote village in the Democratic Re- public of Congo, where he helped locals hand-dig fish farms so they could raise tilapia to feed their families. Even as he pursued an M.D. in the Dartmouth-Brown combined pro- gram and worked for the CDC in various postings, Kilmarx stayed in touch with the village chief. One day the chief said something about Ebola in the village. Kilmarx returned to jump-start the CDC’s response. “I asked my chief how he knew it was Ebola. He reminded me that I’d written him a letter after the [Ebola outbreak] in Kikwit in 1995,” Kilmarx says. “To some extent, that’s how epidemiology works. We set up surveillance systems, but it’s often through personal contacts and knowing people that the world finds out.”
Kilmarx is focused on preventing Zim- babwe’s greatest killer: HIV/AIDS.
