MEMBERSHIP
The Laboratory by the Bay:
Fighting Infections in San Francisco
by Nancy Maddox, MPH, writer
San Francisco—the endlessly scenic
“City by the Bay”—is home to techies,
hippies, foodies and the third largest
concentration of billionaires in the world.
But, while the San Francisco Public Health
Laboratory serves all of the jurisdiction’s
residents—nearly 900,000 people in 2017—
the groups that drive most work are none
of these. Instead, the laboratory focuses
its services on:
• Homeless people, who have higher
risk for tuberculosis (TB) and sexually
transmitted infections
• Men who have sex with men, for whom
the laboratory validated the first test
for throat and anal chlamydia and
gonorrhea
• The 3 million or so international
visitors who flock to the city each
year, potentially infected with novel
communicable pathogens.
Overall, the laboratory performs testing
on behalf of more than 40 local clinics,
including eight public health clinics and
an assortment of private, non-profit
clinics serving various populations. The
vast majority of testing supports the
control of communicable diseases.
Facility
The laboratory occupies 7,000 square
feet in a century-old Beaux Arts edifice.
The facility has marble walls and floors
and a place on the national registry of
historic buildings. It sits in San Francisco’s
(from l to r:) Dante Afable, Wilson Qiu, Victoria Olivas, Binh
Phan, and Tiombe Valone get ready for a day of testing.
Photo: SF PHL
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LAB MATTERS Winter 2019
Civic Center area, across the street from
City Hall and near the city opera house
and symphony hall. Laboratory Director
Godfred Masinde, PhD, said, “The building
is really old, although beautiful. But its
maintenance has become a problem, with
a leaky roof and cracked walls.”
Fortunately, a new facility has been
already been approved and designed.
The new building will add 4,000 square
feet to the laboratory’s overall size, plus
a dedicated BSL-3 suite to replace the
current BSL-2+ suite (grandfathered
for TB testing). It will be located less
than two miles away, on the campus of
the Zuckerberg San Francisco General
Hospital and Trauma Center, a public
facility under the purview of the San
Francisco Department of Public Health.
The move-in date is April 2021.
Director
Masinde, who hails from Kenya, said his
public health career “was not an accident,
but a reality, because I was born in a
rural area of a developing country that
had a lot of public health challenges
like lack of clean water for drinking and
cooking, no proper toilets and no sewage
system.” After watching friends succumb
to preventable endemic diseases—“You
play with them today and tomorrow
they’re dead”—he decided at an early
age to pursue a career that would help
him “keep my village safe from diseases
like malaria.” Masinde completed BS and
MS degrees at the University of Nairobi
and then, sponsored by the World Health
Organization, moved to New Orleans,
where he earned a PhD in molecular
parasitology from Tulane University. After
graduation, Masinde accepted a two-year,
post-doctoral position at Case Western
Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.
He then relocated to California, where he
served as a senior scientist and assistant
research professor at Loma Linda
University and the adjacent Jerry L. Pettis
Memorial Veterans Affairs Medical Center.
“After a few years I joined ThermoFisher
in Carlsbad, CA,” said Masinde. While at
ThermoFisher a bioterrorism coordinator
position opened at the San Bernardino
Public Health Laboratory. This position, he
said, “was my window into public health.”
After advancing to a supervising public
health microbiologist serving both the
San Bernardino and Solano County Public
Health Laboratories, Masinde switched
gears, ramping up a new microbiology
laboratory for a startup company. He
said, “After a two-and-a-half-year period
in Silicon Valley, a position for a public
health laboratory director opened up in
San Francisco City and County, and here
we are today.” Masinde has been director
since 2016.
Staff
The laboratory has a staff of 23 people,
who reflect the city’s racial and ethnic
diversity. “We can speak over seven
languages, which include Vietnamese,
Spanish, Mandarin, Swahili, Japanese
and Tagalog.” Along with the 31other
laboratories comprising California’s
local public health laboratory system,
the San Francisco laboratory now trains
its own public health microbiologists,
who must be certified to practice by the
state of California. “In 2017 we had two
technicians certified as public health
microbiologists and we employed them,”
said Masinde, “so we did not need to wait
due to the shortage of PHM in California.
In 2018, we trained three technicians and
got two certified and this year two more
of our technicians are in training for the
next six months.”
Revenue
The annual laboratory budget is
approximately $3.0 million, with most
of that amount coming from general
city funds, $128,000 from fees and
the remainder from state and federal
grants to the San Francisco Department
of Health.
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