Dr. Sonja Buckley, 86, helped identify Lassa virus
BALTIMORE (AP) ” Dr. Sonja Buckley, the Yale University virologist who helped identify the Lassa virus, died Feb. 2 in a nursing home after a series of strokes. She was 86.
A close friend of Dr. Buckley’s, Joyce Maclay, told the New York Times of the death.
The virus Dr. Buckley helped discover is named for the Nigerian village of the same name, where two missionary nurses died in 1969 and a third contracted the virus and survived after being flown to New York for treatment at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital.
Dr. Buckley, who was part of Yale’s Arbovirus Research Unit, studied the virus, using samples of the nurse’s blood.
She worked with Dr. Wilbur Downs and Dr. Jordi Casals-Ariet, who became ill and was treated with antibodies taken from the surviving nurse’s blood. Dr. Casals-Ariet recovered and lived until last year, when he died at 92.
A laboratory technician, Juan Roman, also contracted the fever and died in 1969.
Because of the risk of spreading the disease, the research was transferred from Yale to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. The virus is transmitted by contact with infected rodents and can be passed from person to person through body fluids.
Lassa fever continues to be endemic in Nigeria, Liberia and Sierra Leone, and is treated with a combination of antibodies and the antiviral drug ribavirin.
Dr. Buckley was born Sonja Grob in Zurich and received her medical degree in 1944 from the University of Zurich, where she was later an instructor in microbiology. In 1941, she married Dr. John J. Buckley, a pathologist also studying in Zurich.
After working as a research assistant at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, she joined the Sloan-Kettering Institute, where she was chosen as head of the solid-tumor program in 1949.
Dr. Sonja Buckley then joined the Rockefeller Foundation in 1957, working in its virus laboratories. In 1964, the labs were transferred to Yale and became known as the Arbovirus Research Unit.
She retired from Yale in 1994. She lived in Stamford, Conn., before moving to Baltimore about five years ago.
She is survived by a sister, Annemarie Kohler of Zurich.
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