By Garrick A. Moritz, editor
Even with the COVID-19 pandemic sweeping the globe and the United States, there are still some people who aren’t taking this virus seriously. Thankfully, Garretson does have a resident who is a serious scientist and trained virologist who actually lives right here in town.
Keith N. Haffer, Ph.D., not only owns Rainbow Delight with his wife Jeri, but he also owns two other companies, Braasch Biotech LLC (which savvy readers will remember we did a story about a few years ago) and Advantage Bio Consultants.
“I got my bachelors at the University of Boston, my Masters and PHD at the University of Massachusetts, Amhurst. I have a doctorate in Veterinary Science, Immunology and Virology.”
Dr. Haffer has taught students at the university level and his biotech and consulting companies have been in business since 1994.
“I’ve been in the veterinary vaccine business for the last 20 years,” he said. “I regularly consult with companies for veterinary practices, vaccines and biosafety. I teach biosafety to laboratories. I have also dealt with, and immunized against, the wide family of the coronaviruses for about 40 years.”
To get started, Dr. Haffer first gave a little background on what a virus is, in case it’s been awhile since that lecture in high school biology.
“There are lots of viruses out there, but this is a specific kind of cross-species jumping. We call these Zoonotic viruses, when they jump from animals to human beings. Rabies is probably the oldest known of these viruses. There are pictographs of rabies infections that go back to the pyramids of ancient Egypt. Rabies is extremely dangerous, but thankfully it is now treatable. Also, thankfully it’s a biological dead end for the virus as it can’t transfer from a human to a human. Smallpox is also a classic example. It mutated from a disease that infected horses or cows to then infect humans. It was, and still is one of the most lethal viruses we’ve ever known. Influenza is of course, the most common virus that people know about, mostly because most of us get annual flu shots. It is also a virus that can and has mutated to affect multiple species.”
“The start of the coronavirus family infecting humans began with SARS and then MERS, they’ re all in the coronavirus family. There were some outbreaks of both those, and they were carefully observed, but there wasn’t widespread dissemination. So these things have always been there, but haven’t yet had the opportunity to jump. Animal to human jump is very good, usually, but the human to human transmission has been much less likely. Until now, that is.”
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