By Bob Sylva, The Sacramento Bee, Calif. Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
May 9--Kenneth Takata, in a career span of 30 years, has developed a healthy resistance to an army of sickening bacteria that might infect and dismay a lesser man.
He has seen every microbe imaginable -- even some viruses unimaginable -- and almost regards ancient plagues like malaria and tuberculosis as old friends who crawl out of their foxholes from time to time and make a brief public cameo. But there are always new, resilient pathogens lurking on the horizon.
Given a choice between Ebola and hantavirus, he'll take an outbreak of queasy salmonella every time.
Takata is the director of the Sacramento County Public Health Laboratory. The laboratory is one of those official governmental bodies that operates in clinical anonymity year after year until some public scare (anthrax!) momentarily raises its profile. Then it's back to the routine contagions at hand.
Every year, the lab performs upward of 80,000 tests for an array of infectious and suspicious characters, from syphilis to staph, HIV to gonorrhea. It is also the first line of defense in the detection of rabid animals and dubious restaurant entrees.
Takata is the microbe king. He has spent his entire working life in this laboratory and is nearing the end of an unheralded public-service career. In his peculiar view, which sees the world in a germ, a glimpse both microscopic and big picture, the Public Health Laboratory is a vital bulwark, a biological safeguard against the spread of preventable disease.
'Public health is not just health care for poor people,' says Takata, refuting a popular stereotype. 'Public health is for the protection of all our community. That's the message I'd like to get out.'
Right now, the world outside bright and sunny, Takata gives a brief tour of the testing lab, whose radiant if contaminated sea of bodily fluids is safely inside trays of microplates and sealed vials.
The lab is a visual disappointment.
No tubes, flasks or witches' brew. Rather, it resembles a run-down bureaucratic warren equipped with boring if expensive microprocessors.
The lab staff members, clad in disposable paper coats, are calm, studious. And if they are alarmed by the perilous cultures in their midst, it's not apparent by their measured gestures.
Each infectious threat, like a difficult hotel guest, has its own testing room. Here's the gonorrhea room. Over there, the HIV room. Down the hall, a new suite set aside for bioterrorism.
The hallways are hung with charts, posters, graphs, press clippings of past public health threats -- all of which gives the lab the look of a really ambitious science fair project.
One curious display plots the incidence of rabies in the county since 1986. Colored pins represent different affected animals found in various locales. Poor Orangevale. Given its smear of red pins, it seems occupied by a colony of rabid skunks. Greenhaven, in contrast, has just one blue pin for a frothy bat.
'If you see a bat flapping on the ground, don't pick it up,' Takata says with an amused wink.
Another chart, with a soaring pair of high-rise columns, tracks the county's red-hot rate of chlamydia and gonorrhea, two sexually transmitted diseases. In one grim respect, the city has achieved world-class status. 'Sacramento has the second-highest rate in the state for chlamydia and gonorrhea,' Takata notes. 'That's our claim to fame.'
Given that distinction, Takata can't resist issuing a public admonishment: 'With unprotected sex, you are at risk for all sexually communicable diseases, including AIDS.' From his cool, professional perspective, it only takes a moment's incaution to become a statistic at the public health laboratory.
Takata is sitting in his small office now, which is removed from the gentle agitation of specimen testing. A pile of papers is stacked on his desk. The window blinds are closed. There is a black coffee cup with a legend: 'E Coli Happens.' Cream with that?
Takata is 59 years old. He has a nearly round face, a healthy bronze glow, with a fringe of graying hair and a streaked mustache. He is short and stocky, wearing a plum shirt and gray slacks. He is friendly, funny, almost chronically upbeat. His system must be producing a batch of ebullient antibodies.
He joined the public health department in 1967, in an era when polio, diphtheria, smallpox and mild venereal disease were all the rage. He has been the director of the Public Health Laboratory for 28 years. Colleagues, such as Dr. Glennah Trochet, county health officer, are astounded at both Takata's steady helmsmanship at the lab and his institutional memory for bacterial episodes.
'When I first started in this business,' Takata says, 'I never heard of anything like E. coli 0157.' He pauses, grins, shakes his head in amazement. 'And I used to eat a lot of rare hamburger.'
Since then, the biological world has become an increasingly complicated and dangerous place.
Kenneth Kenichi Takata was born in 1943 at Tule Lake, an internment baby. 'I don't remember any of it,' he says of the camp and his Japanese American family's forced evacuation from Sacramento.
Before the war, his father operated a grocery at the corner of Fifth and -- streets. After the war, his business gone, Takata's father got a job at Lucky's. His mother worked as a domestic in various households.
The family lived in a house at Fourth and O, on the edge of Japantown. Takata attended multicultural Lincoln School.
'We lived in a poorer section of town,' he says. 'But we never considered ourselves poor. There was a large Japanese community there. There were always friends over at my house. Lots of people to play with and plenty of ways to get into trouble.'
He graduated from Sacramento High School, and, in a prophetic date, recalls attending his junior prom in the very same brick building that now houses the county lab and Primary Care Facility. But it was at Sacramento State College, not a congested dance hall, where he caught the incurable public health bug.
'What do college kids know?' he laughs of his career choice. 'I just knew I liked microbiology, and public health departments do microbiology.'
Today, the public health laboratory (Takata requests that its location, though hardly a secret, be left unidentified, given its bioterrorist function) occupies 6,000 square feet in a haphazard building that has seen better days. The lab employs eight microbiologists, seven lab assistants, and has an operating budget of nearly $2 million.
Of its nearly 80,000 tests a year, the vast majority are for HIV (15,000 to 20,000 on average), plus an equal number for chlamydia/gonorrhea. The specimens originate from various clinics, hospitals and outreach testing programs. Under contract to UC Davis Medical Center, the lab also runs approximately 7,000 tests a year for tuberculosis.
Since the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the growing terrorist threat of Iraq, the county lab has had a contingency plan for testing suspected biological weapons. In the anthrax scare post 9/11, the lab tested 50 samples of purported anthrax, all of which turned out to be hoaxes.
'I think it's good,' says Takata of the lab's ability to swiftly respond to the threat of biological weapons. 'We have a good working relationship with local hospitals, other labs, the FBI and hazardous materials specialists.'
Takata sees a positive result from negative threats. Namely, a growing public appreciation for the pivotal role of public health departments -- a newfound esteem and status that have eluded him his entire career.
'It (9/11) made the general public and policymakers aware of the necessity for public health protection,' Takata contends. 'That we are just as important as patrol cars on the street. For the first time, people perceive public health and the control of communicable disease as important.'
Takata's days on the ramparts of public health are numbered. Plans are in the works to move the lab and the Primary Care Facility into a new building. The testing lab, its design and safety status raised to Level 3, would occupy an 11,000-square-foot space. After the new lab is up and running, Takata will contemplate his retirement.
When his long career is viewed in compressed fashion, Takata has seen a rampaging epidemic of syphilis, gonorrhea, tuberculosis and salmonella scares at school cafeterias, heartbreaking cases of young people snatched by meningococcal meningitis, various strains of rare malaria, the devastation of HIV, and now the truly chilling prospect of Ebola and hantavirus.
All in all, a frightening way to spend one's working day, compiling dire statistics and sipping from a coffee mug that says 'E Coli Happens.' He remains steadfastly buoyant, sublimely immune.
'When I was younger,' Takata says, 'I found it all interesting. As I grew older, I realized this is an important field. We make a difference in controlling communicable diseases, in protecting public health. There is a satisfaction in knowing you are doing something that can make a difference and save lives.'
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(c) 2002, The Sacramento Bee, Calif. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.
