Look Who it Was Random video

Physician Marc Levin: Encountering New Diseases

310 views · Published 17 June 2013 · 2:21 · Indexed 22 September 2026

Channel: Doctors Without Borders / MSF-USA · 2013 · Nonprofits & Activism

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Marc Levin, a family physician in New York City, has completed MSF missions in Chad, Niger, and the Central African Republic. His assignments with MSF brought him into contact with diseases he had never before treated in the United States, such as rabies, measles, and sleeping sickness.

TRANSCRIPT
So, there were a number of diseases that I treated during my missions with MSF that I hadn't seen in the U.S. and I learned a lot about.  Some things I had certainly heard about or learned about in school, but never actually treated.  Things like rabies, measles -- there always seemed to be measles outbreaks where I was working, both in Niger and the Central African Republic -- meningitis, and in the Central African Republic, part of our project was to address the high prevalence of African sleeping sickness.  

The African sleeping sickness project was really interesting because obviously that's not something we see here.  What we were doing was going into villages that had high prevalence.  Some of the villages had 15 percent prevalence of African sleeping sickness and we would go in and do a mass screening of everyone.  So they would get a finger prick blood test.  It is spread by the tsetse fly, so if anyone in village has it and they get bit by a fly, it can be spread to anyone in the village.  So really the goal is to check everyone on the village, because if you eradicate it from everyone, then no matter how many times the tsetse fly bites, it won't spread the disease.  So the treatment started with mass screening of villages across a huge area in the northern Central African Republic.  If people were positive, then they had further workup, often lumbar punctures.  They would often get ganglion cysts that we would feel and they would get biopsied and then they would be admitted for a week for inpatient IV treatment. 

After that they would need surveillance over two years.  So at six months, 12 months and then two years, they would have lumbar punctures.  So we would go back into the villages and really track these patients and repeat their lumbar punctures to see how they were feeling.  There were a fair number where there was a recurrence and then we would bring them to be retreated.  We reduced the prevalence from about 15 percent in some of the villages to less than 0.5 percent since 2008, I think the project started.  So it was an incredibly successful project.  For me as a physician to really learn and feel comfortable about a new disease that I had never seen was really interesting.

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