Nikkei Asia Prizes 2001

Lee Ho-wang

Tenacity key to victory over virus Researcher's efforts reduced by 90% cases of hemorrhagic fever

BY MASAMI SHIMIZU
Senior staff writer

Tracking down the cause of an epidemic disease is a difficult and demanding task. Is the causative agent some bacteria? Is it a virus? How is it transmitted? Lee Ho-wang, president of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Korea, has the kind of tenacity that is needed to meet the challenge head-on.

In discovering the virus that causes hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome (HFRS), Lee succeeded where many other scientists worldwide failed. His work has led to tremendous advances in the fight against this disease not only here in Asia but all around the world.

For Lee, the discovery that the Hantaan virus is the cause of hemorrhagic fever "represented a victory for the brains of Asia." He said this because 200 U.S. scientists, including a Nobel Prize winner, tried to identify the cause of hemorrhagic fever during the 1950s and 1960s, yet after more than 10 years of research they were no closer to an answer than when they began.

Hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome is a serious acute contagious disease. Early symptoms include fever and headache, but as the disease develops it can lead to kidney dysfunction and bleeding under the skin and around the organs.

Once the disease arises, doctors can only treat the symptoms, and patients face a 7-8% chance of death.

Huge epidemic outbreaks of hemorrhagic fever occurred in the 1930s in the former Soviet Union and in northeastern China, and the serious nature of the disease was made clear to the United States in the early 1950s during the Korean War, when about 2,300 U.S. Army troops contracted the disease and some 800 died.

Outbreaks continued after that, with yearly reports of 2,000 to 3,000 cases in South Korea, some 100,000 cases in China and around 12,000 cases in the former Soviet Union.

Lee was a professor at Korea University Medical College when he discovered the Hantaan virus in 1976. Until then, the search for the cause of hemorrhagic fever focused on efforts to isolate the causative agent from hemorrhaging organs and the kidneys of stricken patients. However, all such efforts failed. Lee decided to look elsewhere. Working with funding from the U.S. military, he searched for possible animal carriers of the disease and eventually succeeded in isolating the virus from the lungs of the striped field mouse.

"At first, the American researchers were skeptical about the discovery," he recalled. But eventually the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and research labs from other countries confirmed the finding.

Having discovered the virus, Dr. Lee also got to name it. He chose Hantaan, the name of the river flowing in the central part of the Korean Peninsula near where the striped field mouse lives.

The new ability to isolate the virus also enabled Lee to better diagnose the disease, and he began receiving requests for diagnoses from all around the world. During the Cold War he received requests from the Soviet Union and even from China, with whom South Korea at the time had no bilateral relations.

Lee holds the position of director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center for Virus Reference and Research. In that capacity he has crisscrossed the globe over the past 20 years, making 26 trips to China and more than 100 trips worldwide, including missions to Europe and Africa.

In short, Lee has made a huge contribution to the global diagnosis and prevention of hemorrhagic fever. But his contributions do not stop there; he has also developed a vaccine against the Hantaan virus. "South Korea began vaccinating people like military personnel, farmers and golfers, who are out in places where field mice live, since the mid-1990s, and that has reduced the incidence of hemorrhagic fever by 90%," Lee explained. "China also has a vaccine, and now one is being made in Europe too."

In South Korea, Lee is regarded as someone worthy of the Nobel Prize in medicine. Since the award is often given to persons who have discovered the cause of a disease, this ultimate honor may one day come his way.

In the meantime, Lee continues with a busy schedule, acting as the president of the National Academy of Sciences, helping the government formulate science policy and advising a life science research institute in the outskirts of Seoul, while continuing with his research activities, which include designing vaccines against viruses that resemble the Hantaan virus in other parts of the world.