In tonight’s live meeting your ever-fearless TA Brettania gave quite an interesting synopsis of Cryptococcus gattii, a fungal pathogen that is currently emerging in the Northwest US (and across the border in Canada). If you missed it, I encourage you to look at in in the LiveMeeting archives on Blackboard. Participating students were interested in the large number of animals, particularly marine animals, that have been found to be infected with C. gattii. As strange as it sounds, that a whale or a dolphin could be carrying the same infection as a human, in the larger ecosystem it’s really not so unusual.
Take influenza – you know, too well, by now that influenza viruses also infect birds (ducks, geese, poultry) and swine. Did you know they also infect dogs, cats, horses, ferrets, stone martens and marine mammals (seals and whales)? It’s a huge ecosystem for a microscopic virus – as you may guess, influenza is going to be with us for a long time. Now that we are in Module 3 of the course you are (or will be) familiar with characteristics make pathogens difficult to eliminate or eradicate. Epidemiology, especially infectious disease epidemiology, has never been a field that could stand on it’s own – you can interweave a number of diverse fields of interest and find something interesting to talk about.
Speaking of interesting to talk about – has anyone read this book Inside the Outbreak? “Mark Pendergrast chronicles the exploits of the doctors, nurses, statisticians, and sociologists of the Centers for Disease Control’s Epidemic Intelligence Service, who jet around investigating the causes and remedies of disease outbreaks from Alabama to Zaire…” (publisher’s weekly). I’d be interested to know what you think. (Much of the text is available to read “looking inside” the book at Amazon, link from the picture).
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