Fiset served the Commission on Rickettsial Diseases of the U.S. Armed Forces Epidemiological Board from 1965 to 1976.[4][5][6] He was a consultant to the Surgeon General of the United States, for which he received the Outstanding Civilian Service Award in 1972.[1][2] Between 1987 and 1989, Fiset was chairman of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.[7]
In 1951, Fiset and others wrote in the Canadian Medical Association Journal of their research into three cases of bronchopulmonary candidosis.[8] While working on his doctorate in virology at Clare College, Cambridge University between 1953 and 1956, Fiset worked to decode the structure of Coxiella burnetii, the bacteria causing Q fever, with Michael Stoker.[1][9] The infection typically presents symptoms such as high fever, headaches, and severe muscle aches and pains which can last for several weeks.[3] His subsequent research as a professor at the Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry and University of Maryland School of Medicine led to development of the Q fever vaccine with Australian microbiologist Barry Marmion.[1][2][3][10]Theodore Woodward, writing for the Armed Forces Epidemiological Board, said that an "important and better understanding of Q fever resulted from the work of Dr. Paul Fiset, who showed that Q fever Rickettsiae could wear several faces, called Phase I and Phase II, a change that was important for vaccine development and accurate diagnosis".[4] The vaccine resulted in a protection rate of 95 percent.[3]
In addition to writing extensively about his research into Coxiella burnetii, Fiset also researched typhus and Rocky Mountain spotted fever at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.[1][11] In 1978, he collaborated in the research of a Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever case resulting from a blood transfusion. As reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the peer-reviewed study said the recipient's diagnosis was confirmed "by positive serologic reactions and isolation of Rickettsia rickettsii from blood after inoculation in animals and tissue culture".[12]
In the 1960s to 1980s, Fiset made his home in Hampton, Maryland, with his wife, Marie Lorraine Fiset (née Gosselin), whom he married in 1953 while both were studying microbiology at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France.[14] They had a son, Peter, and two daughters, Lauren and Clare.[2] Fiset was an active volunteer with the Boy Scouts of America in the early 1970s, serving as chairman of his son's Scout troop. The couple moved to nearby May's Chapel in 1982.
