David Patrick

I am an Infectious Disease physician and epidemiologist and have focused most of my career on developing interdisciplinary efforts to identify and manage emerging infectious diseases.

While working in STD/AIDS Control during the 1990s, I attained national and international recognition for work in clinical and epidemiological approaches to STIs. These included editing Canadian guidelines for the treatment of STIs, a number of influential publications in the field and a seat on the scientific board which manages the scholarly International Herpes Management Forum. During the 2000’s, I led rapid academic growth at the Infectious Disease Epidemiology Division at the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control. Our team gained national and international recognition for key roles in bioterrorism preparedness, describing several unique outbreaks (e.g.Cryptococcus gattii disease in a single biogeoclimatic zone in BC), initiating new immunization programs for pneumococcal and group C meningococcal disease and HPV. The team won critical acclaim for receiving SARS cases exported from the Metropole Hotel yet containing the outbreak. This pattern of rapid response research was also brought to bear during the 2009 H1N1 Influenza Pandemic. During that event, we deployed rapid seroepidemiological studies, genomic surveillance of the virus and mobilized the public health sector in BC to use antivirals and vaccines to mitigate morbidity. I am PI on a program of research that marries next generation sequencing with rigorous epidemiological methods in the effort to understand etiology and pathophysiology in several idiopathic chronic diseases, including chronic fatigue syndrome. We have largely recruited a case-control study and sequencing is underway. The team has produced two cutting edge methods papers about how these these technologies can be applied to infectious disease discovery and also specifically to chronic fatigue syndrome.