Loberg leaves legacy of public health service

Michael Loberg, an Island resident and 15-year member of the Tisbury board of health, died in early August at the age of 78. 

Loberg had an impressive career in the pharmaceutical industry. With a Ph.D. in nuclear chemistry, he helped develop new healthcare scanning technology, and drug treatments for cancer and diabetes still used today. 

He also left a big mark on Martha’s Vineyard, where he worked to combat nitrogen pollution in coastal embayments, introducing fertilizer bylaws and innovative/alternative septic systems. He also helped run Vineyard Medical Care in Vineyard Haven for more than a decade. And as a volunteer board member, likely his biggest mark on public health was as an early leader raising the alarm on tick-borne illnesses on the Island. The colleagues with whom Loberg worked locally have said that without him, there likely wouldn’t be a Martha’s Vineyard Tick Program, which has become a model for New England; and tick-borne illnesses, spread so deep into the community, would not be, as limited as it is still, nearly as well-known as they are today.

“When he saw a problem, instead of complaining, he went right out and did something,” said Dick Johnson, who was hired to run the tick program after Loberg helped land seed money. “He really dedicated himself to doing something about it.”

Loberg was born in St. Louis, Mo. He would go on to receive a Ph.D. at Washington University in nuclear chemistry by developing gall-bladder imaging, and worked with a team to develop the PET scanner. Later, at the University of Maryland, he helped distribute nuclear diagnostic drugs made in his lab. He would transition to industry research as director of Squibb Diagnostic, and worked with pharmaceutical startups Nitromed and IGM Biosciences. 

His colleagues locally said that he was able to take his long career in pharmaceuticals and relay that experience into helping to solve Island issues. Tick-borne disease was one of the first issues that he took on after being elected to the Tisbury board of health in 2010. 

Sam Telford, a Tufts University professor with decades of research on Martha’s Vineyard, said that before Loberg, there was really minimal attention given to tick research on the Island. He said that Loberg, from his seat in Tisbury, was able to work with the other boards of health to pull funding from a community grant from Martha’s Vineyard Hospital to use in addressing ticks in 2011. The funding helped a variety of initiatives, including hiring Johnson to perform surveys across the Island. The group also created a website that, along with giving information about ticks and tick-borne illness, featured videos of local residents discussing the issues. 

Telford said that at the time, Loberg was successful in highlighting how significant Lyme disease was on the Island, which he said was then greatly underreported. While the Vineyard is now considered to have one of the highest rates of the tick-borne illness in the country, Telford said that the state received only hundreds of reports of Lyme coming from the Island. With his background in pharmaceuticals coming in handy, Loberg traced the amount of doxycycline prescriptions — an antibiotic used to combat Lyme — and found that there were at least 2,000 prescriptions filled on the Island.

He also looked into solutions. Johnson said that it was Loberg, in 2013, who first commissioned a flyover survey of the deer population. When the tick program first started, it wasn’t common knowledge that deer flooded the Island, or at least to the extent that its large population contributed to the tick boom. 

Telford noted that Loberg had an ability to see a local problem and know how to take action. Jim Butterick, an Oak Bluffs board of health member who worked as medical director alongside Loberg at Vineyard Medical for years, credits Loberg with doing the same to help raise awareness about and combat nitrogen pollution and the eutrophication of local ponds.

One of the first action items was creating an Island-wide fertilizer bylaw. Fertilizer runoff from coastal lawns contributes to excess nitrogen and an abundance of algae in waterways. But a bylaw was highly controversial among landscapers and others who used fertilizer regularly. Butterick said that Loberg had an innate ability to talk with a broad spectrum of Island residents, from wealthier landowners coming from out of state to the landscapers who were using fertilizer. 

“He was so unassuming and so smart; he could answer any level of question on a level that they could understand,” Butterick said.

Eventually, the fertilizer bylaw passed in all six towns. Maura Valley, a former Tisbury health agent who worked with Loberg, said that he was especially proud that only one person in Edgartown voted against the bylaw; otherwise it had passed unanimously across the Island.

Valley said that Loberg also helped introduce new technologies — like innovative/alternative septic systems, known as I/A system — to the Island to further reduce nitrogen. The systems are especially good at reducing nitrogen from home wastewater. Valley credited Loberg with landing a grant that would allow the town to study the use of I/A by installing 10 of them in Tisbury.

Valley said that Loberg was a visionary, in that he wanted the Island to be proactive in not allowing Vineyard waterways to see the same fate as those on Cape Cod, where estuaries were and continue to be heavily polluted with nitrogen.

“He was there to do what he could to help out and make things happen,” Valley said.

For some who knew Loberg, his passing is a call to accomplish challenges they face. “He’s an inspiration to me. He saw a problem and he tried to take it on,” Johnson said. “It makes me that much more committed. I want to get things done, and take things by the horns.”