Battling Rabies and Beyond: A Molecular Epidemiologist’s Perspective of the Medical Laboratory Sciences

Rodney E. Rohde, PhD, is the chair of the Medical Laboratory Science Program at Texas State University (TXST), San Marcos, Texas, where he’s also a University Distinguished Professor. But that’s just a brief snapshot of the highly accomplisfhed molecular epidemiologist. A TEDx speaker, Rohde is also a Regents’ professor, and the associate director of the Translational Health Research Centre at TXST, an associate adjunct professor of biology at Austin Community College, and a clinical assistant professor at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center. These accolades are even more impressive knowing that Rohde was the first of his family to attend university. 

Joining the Oral Rabies Vaccination Program

Rohde became interested in biology in high school but wasn’t certain of what he wanted to pursue. “I knew I was going to be somewhat involved in either medicine or science research, but I didn’t know all the available career paths and majors,” Rohde recalls as a first-generation college student. 

Naive to the events that would precipitate a rabies epidemic in the south of the US, Rohde was halfway through his bachelor of science (Table 1) when a coyote in Starr County, South Texas, was confirmed positive for rabies in 1988 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), making this event the first dog-harbored rabies in the US. According to a 2004 report, Rabies in Texas, A Historical Perspective, published by the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS), which was founded in 1856, Texas had reckoned with rabies since the 1800s. At the time, cauterizing a rabies bite with a “red-hot iron” followed by a “strong solution of soapy water” was the only recognized treatment prior to the development of a preventive rabies vaccine by Louis Pasteur in 1884.

In the years that followed, the DSHS improved upon the Pasteur vaccine program. Yet rabies vaccination continued to be mostly administered post-exposure, depending on the time from the bite. When Rohde joined the Texas DSHS after graduating from his Master of Science degree in 1992 (Table 1), molecular biology had just started to expand into public health, so when he shifted his profession to a hybrid of microbiologist/molecular epidemiologist, he witnessed the birth of a recombinant vaccine for rabies at the DSHS.

But while the events surrounding the rabies epidemic would later cement Rohde’s passion for infectious diseases, his career began with microbiology (Table 1). “I took my first microbiology course in my sophomore year (1986-87), and it was with professor George H. Meyer, a very early mentor of mine, and later with Gary M. Aron of Texas State University, and I just absolutely fell in love with the hidden world of microbiology,” he recalls.

Aron encouraged Rohde to pursue research internships at the prestigious MD Anderson Cancer Centre and a master’s degree studying the pathogenesis of poliovirus under Aron’s supervision. Rohde recalls his early work with poliovirus as a formative experience that shaped his understanding of the escapist nature of microbes in the presence of antimicrobials. “Looking back, it was the genesis of my interest in antimicrobial resistance. I do that work on the bacterial side now,” he says, referring to his advocacy work around antibiotic resistance stewardship, with a focus on methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).

While working at the DSHS, Rohde worked on establishing the then novel emerging technique of RT-PCR to help track the rapidly unfolding 1990s rabies epidemic in Texas. Two years in, as news of the epidemic grew louder, a 14-year-old boy from Hidalgo County, Texas, was playing with a sick puppy, and a few days after began complaining to his family of a sore throat, and shortness of breath, prompting a visit to the emergency department (ED). The boy became the sixth rabies-linked fatality in 1994 in the US. It was then that the governor at the time, Ann Richards, declared a state health emergency, Rohde says. The number of rabies-related reports approached a record-setting 9,500 cases. According to the Texas Wildlife Services, the high number of cases was the result of two separate and simultaneous epizootic outbreaks caused by two different rabies variants, one in coyotes and another in gray foxes, throughout the state.

     

From the cockpit of a Canadian Twin Otter aircraft, Rohde dispensed an oral recombinant rabies vaccine for wildlife called RABORAL-V-RG. “I sat in the co-pilot seat and helped control the density of the bait delivered to the wildlife population,” he says. The bait was akin to kibble containing an attenuated recombinant vaccinia virus strain harboring the rabies glycoprotein. Once bitten, the contents would spray onto the animal’s tonsils, where immune cells would learn to recognize the rabies glycoprotein, Rohde explains.

With 850,000 vaccine baits dispensed across the South Texas drop zone, the feat represented the largest aerial vaccine/bait drop in the world at that time. “We worked with the CDC, and the Canadian Ministry of Natural Resources, the Texas National Guard, and the DSHS, which at the time greatly consisted of veterinarians and wildlife experts,” he says. “It really set in motion my appreciation for global public health at a time when the concept of One Health was not yet as well known.” 

Overall, the efforts to control the epidemic involved a multipronged approach, including legislation, public education, surveillance, quarantine, and isolation, as well as direct medical interventions, such as vaccination. 

Why science communication matters

His baptism-by-fire with the rabies virus made Rohde a strong candidate for the medical laboratory science (MLS) program at his alma mater, where he was recruited to share his insight and expertise as a professor. It was then that he pursued a qualitative PhD in public health education pedagogy and shifted his research focus from viruses to antimicrobial resistant stewardship and MRSA.

“I did my PhD from a qualitative standpoint about learning gaps and the needs of the public and health care to understand the critical importance of organism identification followed by accurate susceptibility testing,” says Rohde, whose work also heavily focuses on informing and empowering the public about their health. “Patients sometimes don’t know which questions to ask. Imagine what would happen if all of the sudden they were asking their doctors, ‘Is this the best antibiotic for this infection? Did you take a culture?’”

Empowering the public with information is also why Rohde is so passionate about teaching and mentoring—it’s a way of giving back in honor of the mentors that helped him along the way, he says. As a first-generation college student, he didn’t know opportunities like internships were available, which is partly why he didn’t initially pursue being a microbiologist or a molecular epidemiologist. His early mentors played a large role in awakening his passion for microbiology, as well as for communicating and teaching science, and he hopes to do the same for his students.

Though many of the science careers we are familiar with today did not exist yet when Rohde was pursuing undergraduate studies in the late 1980s to early 1990s, “The world was full of possibilities,” he says. “PCR was just coming on board. A lot of things were intersecting; molecular biology was emerging, as was the internet.” As our world is once more undergoing a metamorphosis with the rise of artificial intelligence, placing current and future students at an uncertain, yet exciting career crossroads, Rohde advises his students to “be in the present” and hopes they too will someday look back in awe at their past career adventures.