Jordi Casals i Ariet (born 15 May 1911, Viladrau, Osona, Spain; died 10 February 2004) was a Catalan physician and epidemiologist.
[2][3][1] Casals' major legacies include his work on viral taxonomy, especially for insect-borne viruses, and significant improvements in safety in the handling of dangerous pathogens in laboratory settings.
The latter stem in part from an incident in 1969 at Yale where Casals barely survived the Lassa fever he contracted while studying the virus in the laboratory, and another staff member, Juan Roman, died.
He remained as an intern at Hospital Clínic de Barcelona until 1936, when he emigrated to the United States during the Spanish Civil War.
In 1973, biologists in Sierra Leone, with the help of teams from Yale and the CDC, determined that the Lassa virus was being passed to humans from wild rats.
[14] Pinneo was flown to New York, along with tissues from other patients and victims, and treated for nine weeks at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, and survived.
[9] A specialist in tropical diseases at the Columbia Presbyterian provided samples from Pinneo to the Yale Arbovirus Research Unit.
[citation needed] In December 1969, a technician at the laboratory, Juan Roman, was admitted to a hospital in Pennsylvania where he was visiting his family, with a fever of 105 °F (41 °C) and in acute distress.
After his death, forty-one hospital personnel who had been in contact with him and seven family members were put under intense surveillance for two weeks in Pennsylvania, and in Puerto Rico where he was buried, but all managed to escape the infection.
A few months later, technician Juan Roman became ill and died, even though he never worked directly in the laboratory or dealt with the virus.
The chilling effect of this caused the laboratory to halt work on the virus, and transfer the samples to the CDC maximum-security lab.