4 minute read
Outbreak Insider
Pandemic gives steady-at-the-helm public health leader Christine Bean ’82, ’03G her biggest test yet
When Christine Kenney Bean was an undergraduate at UNH, she considered majors and careers that included accounting and journalism. But she enjoyed her two-semester internship in clinical laboratory science training at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center so much that she chose to pursue laboratory science as her career.
Accounting’s and journalism’s loss proved to be the state of New Hampshire’s public health gain. From her position as laboratory director at the New Hampshire Public Health Laboratories, Bean and her staff serve as the hub of the state’s COVID-19 response team, coordinating the laboratory surveillance and testing of new outbreaks of the pandemic. “Most people don’t know that state labs are actually a part of the Centers for Disease Control and receive federal funding to apply CDC protocols at the state level,” says Bean, part of whose job entails keeping the federal grants flowing in from Washington.
Unlike hospital labs that do diagnostic testing on individuals, Bean’s lab conducts surveillance on population health.
A typical project might involve testing 5,000 mosquitoes a summer for the presence of eastern equine encephalitis (EEE) or West Nile viruses. “The outcome of finding positive mosquito batches in the city of Manchester might be to recommend that the community cancels Little League games for a day or two,” Bean explains. In another widely reported case, Bean’s lab tested 6,000 people in order to trace a hospital outbreak of hepatitis C back to its origin in a single shared needle used by an infected staffer at a New Hampshire hospital.
Bean’s lab thrives on complex epidemiological puzzles, but in February 2020, she and her colleagues got their biggest challenge to date when the CDC sent its test methods and protocols for the coronavirus to all state public health laboratories with instructions to start testing, and fast. In the beginning of the pandemic, Bean’s lab did all of New Hampshire’s COVID-19 testing, which amounted to some 1,000 tests a day. “We had to add 10 more people to our staff of 65 to work exclusively on COVID-19,” Bean recalls. “Even 10 months into the pandemic, we’re still testing as many as 1,800 specimens in a day.”
That’s how Michael Harhen, administrative director of pathology and laboratory medicine at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, got involved. Early on in the pandemic, Harhen and Bean both knew the pandemic was going to strain the state’s healthcare system in unprecedented ways. “We talked constantly about what she was doing and how to get the CDC method of assay to our lab,” Harhen recalls. What began as two leaders talking each other “down off the ledge” turned into a collaboration between two whole labs on the issues related to fighting the pandemic, managing testing overflow and comparing notes on methodologies and workflows.
Harhen says Bean’s collaborative skills are not only helping the state face down a pandemic, they are also forging a powerful new partnership that will benefit the state for years to come. “If I can say anything good came out of this pandemic, it was a closer relationship in collaboration between Dartmouth Hitchcock and the New Hampshire Public Health Laboratory,” Harhen says.
“I’ve never seen Christine get rattled,” he adds. “She’s as cool as a cucumber no matter what happens.”
Stephanie Payeur ’95, laboratory supervisor at Catholic Medical Center in Manchester, describes Bean as a true rarity — a “double threat” equally at home with the science and business of health care. (Bean earned an MBA from Southern New Hampshire University in 1993.) Payeur met Bean when Payeur was an undergraduate trying to decide how to go into medicine without becoming a doctor or nurse. At the time, Bean was earning a doctorate in microbiology at UNH and teaching medical laboratory science at her alma mater. “Christine helped me discover med lab science. It was the best move I ever made,” Payeur says.
Now, as Bean’s colleague, Payeur appreciates the broad skill set her former professor brings to the table as a state public health leader. “Healthcare is a business right now,” says Payeur. “There are big management and financial pieces to managing a busy lab. The medical laboratory community is lucky to have a leader who understands financial issues like compliance, insurance and reimbursement, and who can also switch on a dime to go deep on the science.”
Bean says that in today’s high-tech world of laboratory science, she values the human factor most of all. “I got into public health because I thrive on teamwork,” she says. “When I look at what we’ve done in this laboratory, testing something in the neighborhood of 175,000 samples for COVID-19 and having had no exposures to our team, I feel like we are doing amazing work under stressful conditions. I’m proud.”
