Ex-Peace Corps recalls ‘unforgettable’ Sabah
Published on: Sunday, March 26, 2023
By: Kan Yaw Chong
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Scotti and wife Hilda Kan, sister Mary Kan and husband Captain Naru Kiob.
“I remember one day when one desperate father rushed all the way into the Queen Elizabeth Hospital from the backside.”
“Dressed only in loin cloth and a head scarf he was carrying this baby, pleading for help,” remembered Scotti who was attached to QE hospital as a clinical biologist between 1967-68.
Clinical biologist, Anthony Scotti, who started the Microbiology lab at QEH in 1967.
“Dr. Roche, Hospital Director and pathologist stopped them and called for a microbiologist. So I came down to take a specimen from the baby but sadly the baby was already dead!”
“I took a specimen nevertheless from the throat and went back up to my lab, examined the specimen microscopically and gave a presumptive diphtheria. The baby had died from diphtheria,” Scotti recalled.
A shock
“That was a shock because I saw the poor dad obviously coming in from far away ulu jungle of Sabah bringing in that child and how long that baby had diphtheria before he brought him in too late I don’t know, so that was a shock to me, this is the incident that struck me the most among a lot of instances, ” Scotti reflected on the pathos of it all because the baby did not have the benefit of easy access to early detection and medical treatment.
Diphtheria is fatal in 5 to 10pc of cases but for children under five and adults over 40, the fatality rate can hit 20pc, if not treated promptly.
But Anthony Scotti’s story is a vivid reminder to many post war Sabahan seniors who remember the presence of Peace Corps across Sabah in the 1960s.
John F Kennedy’s campaign speech
The Peace Corps programme is the brain child of John F Kennedy who first mooted it to a crowd of 10,000 University of Michigan students in a wee hour campaign speech 14 Oct 1960 and challenged them to live and work in developing countries around the world, dedicated to the cause of peace, service, understanding and development, in return for only a subsistence allowance.
“How many of you who are going to be doctors are willing to spend your days in Ghana?” Kennedy taunted.
“Technicians and engineers, how many of you are willing to work in foreign service and spend your lives travelling around the world?” he asked.
Apparently, 1000 students signed a petition all for it before Kennedy became President and established the Peace Corps under an Executive Order on March 1, 1961.
Outgrowth of a cold war
In geopolitical context though, the Peace Corps institution was an outgrowth of the Cold War when Kennedy noted that the Soviet Union had hundreds of men, women, scientists, physicists, teachers, engineers, doctors, nurses prepared to spend lives abroad in the service of Soviet ideology.
A combative Kennedy wondered aloud where young Americans of similar calibre were in this grand scheme of strategic competition?
But as a qualified ‘medical technologist’ graduated in microbiology, Anthony Scotti, more than fit the bill for Kennedy’s idea to forge the international cause for ‘peace and development’ in such an unsung backwater country like Sabah then.
For sure, the grief-stricken father of a diphtheria victim must have wished that more causal disease experts like Scotti were placed even in deep interior, so that his child could have lived by virtue of early detection.
Scotti remembered what Kennedy wanted
Scotti joined the Peace Corps in and around the Program’s peak years 1966-67 when there were more than 15,000 of them in 52 countries.
He recalled how he applied and was eagerly accepted by the Peace Corps Program which celebrated its 60th anniversary in 2021.
“When I was in school, I remember what type of people Kennedy wanted for the Peace Corps, I had my degree and my credentials and then when I put my application in they grabbed me right away because they needed microbiologists and medical technologists, they grabbed me right away and asked would you like to go to Africa or North Borneo? I Chose North Borneo,” Scotti said.
The choice was Sabah, not Africa
But why chose Sabah and not Africa?
“I remember Martin and Osa Johnson, I remember what they did in North Borneo, I saw their movies, that stuck in my mind, I knew Sabah needed laboratory help, I could provide that and learn at the same time,” Scotti connected the dots that took him to Sabah in 1967, with no regrets.
Destination Sabah fundamentally shaped Scotti’s destiny more than a roaring career advancement.
Scotti and Hilda Kan from Kg Ramayah, Penampang on their engagement in 1968.
Scotti and Hilda Kan’s four children. From left, Anthony, Jeanette, Christopher, Angelina.
He met and married a charming Sabahan, Hilda Kan – a Sino-Kadazan from one of the rare Kan clan, with four children Anthony, Christopher, Jeanette and Angelina. On return to America, he landed on a series of top jobs on account of his productive and rewarding specialist experience gained in Sabah.
Dispatched to Sabah as a Medical Team
Scotti said he was dispatched to Sabah as part of a team.
“To begin with, we as Peace Corps members came as a medical team and there were two groups in the medical team – nurses and technologists,” Scotti said.
“The nurses trained people in small rural interior village hospitals while the medical technologists trained and taught lab staff in Queen Elizabeth Hospital on four disciplines:
- Chemistry which was handled by a PhD Malaysian
- Haemotology , taught by Peace Corps Sandy Duekmejian
- Urinalysis and Serology taught by Peace Corps Toni Mae
- Microbiology taught by Peace Corps Anthony Scotti
Together, Scotti, Toni, Sandy and the Malaysian chemist were put in charge of setting up a new lab (after moving in from the old lab where they were placed when they first arrived in 1967) in different areas Histology site, serology, Microbiology, Cytology etc.
Work of the Peace Corps team in a nutshell
“In a nutshell, what we actually did were as follows,” Scotti outlined.
“We taught in two types of schools – Medical Technology School attended by people with advanced degree from Sabah and Singapore and Medical Technician School attended by students from Kota Kinabalu area, who were taught the basics of laboratory medicine as lab assistants who were sent to rural hospitals to do lab tests for dressers there.”
Peace Corps Sandy Duekmejian (left) and Toni Mae (seated) with local staff in 1967-8 at the lab.
“Dressers those days were looked upon as ‘assistant doctors’,” according to Tham Yau Kong (MBE) whose father John Tham once worked as a Dresser in a chain of town and cottage hospitals spanning from Colonial days to Malaysia era, in Jesselton, Kent Hospital, Sandakan, to Beluran, Labuan, Sipitang, Menumbok, Bandau, Kudat, Lahad Datu, Kota Marudu and finally Tenom.
”Higher level tests came to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital and the medical technologists because we had the equipment there to do those types of tests. So overall, that is the clinical laboratory made up of various areas to do tests to give doctors the information to treat their patients,” Scotti explained.
Role of Scotti – a ‘clinical biologist’
As a clinical biologist, what did Scotti do?
“I am not a doctor, but if a doctor wants to treat pneumonia for example, he has to know what type of organism is causing that disease.”
“My job is to get a specimen from the actual patient, analyse that specimen under the microscope, or the culture method, or the molecular biological method and determine what causes the pneumonia, then the doctor knows what’s the proper medicine to treat that disease.”
“That’s more or less what I do as a clinical biologist who is good at and am able to examine a microscopic slide of a specimen and give a presumptive opinion of what the aetiology (cause of a disease) or what the organism might be, to the physician at least 24 hours to 48 hours before the culture which will give conclusive information,“ he described his job function.
“The point is you have to treat infections very early to get proper results. The earlier you treat any type of disease, the better off you are, same with cancer, if you treat early, you get a better result,” he wrapped up his role.
Range of diseases Scotti investigated
What were the categories or range of diseases Scotti had investigated for the doctors in the hey-days of the 60s?
“Here are the disease categories – bacterial diseases, such as salmonella, protozoan disease like malaria, parasitic disease, viral disease, Aspergillus (mold), fungal diseases. Have you ever heard of candida albicans, that’s the genus and species of yeast and so it’s a fungal disease. So you have bacteria, virus, you have parasites, you have fungus – those are categories of diseases that a microbiology laboratory will investigate for a physician to give him information for treating that patient,” he detailed.
Walter Reuther – the real founder of Peace Corps ideals
While he Peace Corps is attributed to John F Kennedy, it was Walter Reuther, President of United Auto Association who first envisioned straight after WW2 the idea of a ‘Total Peace Offensive’ under which US should establish a voluntary agency who argued that the more young college graduates can be sent abroad with the slide rule, text book and a medical kit to help people help themselves with the tools of peace, the fewer young people would need be sent with guns and weapons of war – very humanitarian and development centric ideals.
Learnt a lot from Sabah
So what had the productive experience as a Peace Corps in Sabah done for Scotti?
He said: “When Ii came here I had my degree, I was a specialist in medical technology clinical laboratory medicine, my special field was microbiology. So when I came here I got a lot of experience myself not only in training but also in laboratory medicine, because I saw diseases and I made a serum that I could never do in the States because of what was needed here at that time. So I learnt a lot from what I did here, not only did I train but I learnt a lot in microbiology so when I went back to the States and put in my application, I got a job just like that,” Scotti said.
Top dog jobs after Sabah
In fact, his two-year work experience at QE advanced his career by a long shot, he conceded.
“Yes, my experience in Sabah helped me rise fast and I became a Supervisor and became a Chief microbiologist in no time. I was a microbiologist at Provident Medical Centre for 37 years in Seatle Washington and then I became a microbiologist of Swedish hospital for another 10 years and I went to the Institute of Environmental Health which I was involved in forensic microbiology for 17 years,” Scotti elaborated.
Sabah as a rich learning ground
Asked what he meant by “ I learnt a lot’ from what he did in Sabah, he said:
“One of the things I learnt here that I never learnt before was how to read a preparation from a disease process, how to look at a tissue and how to look at inflammatory cells and how to look at pathogens that might be there, to determine what might be so I could examine a slide of a specimen and give a feeling, a presumptive opinion of what might be there and give the doctor a heads-up 24, 48 or 72 hours before that culture came out as inflammatory, or the test that came out confirm it’s inflammatory.”
“Nowadays we can do rapid testing like PCR tests and PCR tests can be done in eight hours so what took me a slide and only presumptive opinion now you can do PCR definitively. So the testing has come a long way and I think we can do PCR in QE1. They call it pathology laboratory but really it should be called clinical pathology. Microbiologist Jaistin Tamin is in charge of the Microbiology Unit,” he noted how things had changes since.
A Judo Black Belt
On a personal note, Scotti became the first American Judo Black Belt while working in Sabah
“I studied judo in the US but when I came here I was just a Brown Belt but I finished my training under the late Mr Kim, a Korean 7th degree Black belt in judo and 5th degree Black Belt on Taekwondo and he certified me in 1968,” Scotti took pride.
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