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Alberto Paniz-Mondolfi treated some of the world’s most horrific infectious diseases before fleeing Venezuela. Now, this fun is helping him get to the bottom of MIS-C.
By Melinda Wenner Moyer
When coronavirus arrived in the United States it surprised many doctors and health professionals, but Alberto Paniz-Mondolfi was not one of them. Nor was he surprised when, a few months later, a small number of inflamed young people began to develop widespread inflammatory symptoms. As someone who has been fighting epidemics in South America for years, learned how pathogens spread and what they can do.
“When you deal with those guys, you somehow expand an instinct,” he says, “it’s like you can feel them. “
Paniz-Mondolfi, MD, Ph. D. , is an assistant professor of pathology, molecular and cellular medicine at Mount Sinai Icahn School of Medicine, who has studied and treated some of the most horrific infectious diseases in the Western Hemisphere. Forced to flee his home country of Venezuela during the economic and political crisis of 2019, he thought his battles against mysterious contagions would disappear, at least for a time, but then sank amid one of the deadliest pandemics in the world. world.
Now she’s looking to solve an urgent and annoying Covid-19 mystery by using clues to her encounters beyond the infectious: Why does the coronavirus, which largely forgives children, make a very small proportion of them very, very sick?And why are black children too?Or Latino, like him?
Dr. Paniz-Mondolfi, 43, father of two, born in Venezuela, but divided his years of formation between that country and Kenya, where his grandfather, a biologist, an ambassador. His love of viruses encouraged component through a safari in Kitum. Cave in Kenya’s Mount Elgon National Park in the 1980s. During the visit, his grandfather told him that several years earlier, bats had inflamed tourists with the Marburg virus, a relative of Ebola. He had arrived hoping to see elephants but had remained fascinated. across the microbial universe.
Even with a pediatric mother and two uncles as renowned Venezuelan doctors, Dr. Paniz-Mondolfi sought to do more than clinical medicine as a career; as he became older, he also sought to examine infectious diseases. in Venezuela, Dr. Paniz-Mondolfi worked with a Venezuelan clinician, Jacinto Convit, MD, a pioneer in leprosy research.
After obtaining a master’s degree in parasitology and tropical diseases in 2006, Dr. Paniz-Mondolfi has completed international fellowships in microbiology, molecular genetics and skin diseases, and a momentary residency in pathology in the United States. kind of parasite that had inflamed a man in the Bronx, like a new mycobacteria that made two Connecticut residents sick.
Dr. Paniz-Mondolfi then returned to Venezuela, where he studied and treated patients with diseases such as dengue, Chagas, chikungunya and Guanarito virus, a mysterious hemorrhagic fever that kills nearly one in three people it infects. In 2018, dr. Paniz-Mondolfi and his team were among the first in Venezuela to identify the Madariaga virus, a mosquito-borne pathogen that can cause fatal brain infections.
Gustavo Benaim, Ph. D. , biologist at the Central University of Venezuela and former advisor to Dr. Paniz-Mondolfi in his doctoral studies, described him as “an intrepid virus hunter”. He added: “He’s an ordinary clinician and microbiologist. “
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