Hope Reaches Around the World
Stopping Dengue Fever
Eva Harris had seen the awful symptoms a thousand times. Then, one day, the sickness seized her too. It was 1995, and Harris was in Nicaragua training scientists in infectious disease diagnosis, when the first signs struck—fever, dizziness, a skull-pounding pain behind her eyes. She was in the early stages of Dengue fever, a mosquito-borne illness that affects more than 100 million people every year.
Harris was lucky. She diagnosed herself and sought immediate treatment; but, in hundreds of thousands of cases, the virus grows undetected. The patients hemorrhage. Without proper treatment, nearly one-third can die.
Thanks to Eva Harris, that situation has begun to change. From her lab at Berkeley, and in the field in Latin America, Harris fights Dengue fever in every phase of its life.
She has developed new means of detecting the virus and has brought the technology to clinics across Latin America. In 1997, that work earned her a MacArthur Fellowship. But she didn’t stop there. These days she’s busy probing the virus for weakness, seeking better treatments, drawing ever closer to a vaccine.
“We’re constantly breaking new ground in the lab,” Harris says. “But we’re also trying to make sure our work reaches the people. In the end, that’s where it really counts.”
Related Links
- Faculty Profile
- The Harris Lab
- International Training And Research In Emerging Infectious Diseases (ITREID)
- Environmental Health Sciences Center
Eva Harris, PhD, is an assistant professor in the School of Public Health - Infectious Diseases and a 1997 MacArthur Fellow.