Walt Piegorsch, PhD, is a trailblazer. At UA, he is redesigning statistics education, and on the global stage he is taking statistical knowledge across disciplines to help quantify all manner of risks, from chemical toxins to terrorism. Piegorsch, a top expert on environmental risk, is the director of a new UA program in statistics and a professor of mathematics in the College of Science. He is also a member of the UA’s BIO5 Institute.
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Virtually everybody you know has the wily virus called CMV. Global rates of infection run from 60 to 90 percent, 100 percent in places with concentrated populations like New Delhi or Hong Kong. And at a typical daycare center, most children have it or soon will, since a bit of saliva or urine will carry it along. For most of us, our immune system keeps it in check. But it can be life threatening to those whose immunity has been compromised.
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As a doctor, John Galgiani, MD, would like to cure his coughing, feverish, sleepy patients, all 50,000 of them. That’s the number of current infections from valley fever. It can leave patients in wheelchairs, facing hospitalization or worse. In Arizona, 30 people are likely to die each year from its complications, which can include meningitis. The disease still has no cure, but he would like to change that.
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For years, biomedical science has been turning individual genes on and off as way to treat gene-based maladies, and as a research tool. Now, a new challenge involves finding ways to bring the entire genetic blueprint of humans, animals and plants into play.
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This is a story about Charlotte, who is three days old at this writing, and a medical puzzle that might affect her susceptibility to many serious diseases. Or it might not. For infants, their first year is crucial. The kind of environment a child of that age needs to switch on certain molecules to lift their disease immunity is fairly well known. For example, living on a farm and being around a dog and lots of microbes are helpful factors, but only for some.
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