June 2025 | Kurt Loft
My parents were missionaries, and they took me to Bangkok when I was six weeks old. While I was there, the seventh pandemic of cholera started (in 1961 in Indonesia) and for several years, when I was 9, 10 and 11, it swept through Bangkok.
Cholera is one of the old great pandemic diseases of mankind. It was absolutely devastating and Bangkok shut down, and I remember the fear of the population. So, I grew up in an environment that had major issues with tropical diseases.
What it did was to focus my interest in trying to understand where these diseases came from and how they spread. This helped form my decision to go to medical school (Tulane University) and get a master’s in tropical medicine.
I spent two years at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) as an epidemic intelligence service officer. These are the guys on the front line who get sent out to investigate outbreaks. I was sent back to Thailand to study epidemics of cholera that were occurring in Vietnamese refugees on flights back to the United States. I wanted to understand how to prevent these outbreaks and save lives.
Evolution always tries to give a virus the ability to better survive and perpetuate. It’s the way the system works.
Nature and the environment are constantly changing, and things aren’t locked in stone. Bacteria and viruses have a unique ability to undergo evolutionary changes. We saw this with COVID and the new variants. So, there’s a need to maintain surveillance and watch what’s going on and use it as a basis to understand, predict and put in place prevention measures.
The idea behind the Emerging Pathogens Institute was to create an interdisciplinary research space to bring together the best and brightest people in a setting where we’re looking at not just one virus or bacteria but a variety of pathogens — including plant, animal and human. This includes veterinarians, physicians, plant pathologists, medical geographers and public health officials. They all focus on a common problem: Why is this specific pathogen suddenly taking off, and how can we slow it down?
The key to managing a pandemic is the development of vaccines, to create a resistance to infections. Now, there’s increasingly strong opposition to that. The basic steps in science and public health have been proven, but all of a sudden people are saying ‘we don’t trust these guys.’
The misinformation today is frightening. Over the last five years through social media, there’s been a lot of incorrect information, and people believe it. It’s easier to believe conspiracy theories than solid science.
People in science are losing their jobs, and their work is being stopped. We have a grant right now with the National Institutes of Health, and they can’t talk to us anymore, so important research is coming to a grinding halt. The University of Florida has placed a number of students at the CDC, and it’s total chaos.
Trying to guide directions for prevention programs is getting shut down. This is destroying the scientific base and disrupting public trust. So, what we get is the measles epidemic in Texas.
“You’ve got to have scientists and public health practitioners to be able to move forward with disease prevention, but the system is being dismantled. There could be profound consequences if we are confronted with another major pandemic.’’
People need to see a long-term pathway for a career, but there’s so much pressure on dismantling the health care system in our country. What worries me the most are the young people who are starting out in a public health career are getting fired. We’re going to have a gap where we’ll be missing a generation of scientists just by what’s happening already.
Florida is tropical. We’ve got the same pathogens that spread in other tropical areas around the world. So, we’ll continue to see diseases that we assume are somewhere in Africa. But many of them were already present in the United States.
The opportunity to grow up in an entirely different world, Bangkok, clearly has an impact on me — an appreciation of multiple cultures, the commonalities among these cultures, and the common needs, concerns and fears among people everywhere. A global perspective is also needed to appreciate how culture influences the response of human populations to epidemics.
My mother grew up in southern Mississippi, and at Sunday dinner they passed around a bottle of quinine water, and everybody took a dose to prevent malaria.
I have four grandsons, and two live here in Gainesville. I do all the stuff one does with 4- and 6-year-old kids. The other thing I love is gardening and pulling weeds. It does wonders for one’s mental health.