Day 2(1/4/18) *Atlanta/CDC*

          
Inside the CDC!




















Today was our first full day at the CDC(which, by the way, has such nice views everywhere...it's a really beautiful building inside, and just walking into it was quite breathtaking), and our host, Melissa(who is an Olaf alum!) took us through a full day of an outbreak simulation. Wow, what a hard job it must be to do what we did in one day as a full-time career; no doubt rewarding and extremely necessary, but very challenging!

We learned about general outbreak vocabulary, protocol, and studies used in the investigations. For example, we looked at the pros/cons of cohort, cross-sectional, and case-control studies. Also, we now know what a "case definition" is, as well as how the CDC recommends reporting to the media! Most of the day, however, we spent pretending to investigate a case that Melissa created for us, about a certain illness that unfortunately fell upon the St.Olaf campus.

So, here's the case...
A few concerned students at St.Olaf presented with symptoms around finals including frail  nails, itchiness, fatigue, "slippery-feeling" tongues, nausea, and hair loss. Not all of the cases(that's how they refer to "patients" in the CDC world) presented with all of the symptoms, but rather with only a few each. There were investigations at the same time into three emerging diseases called "Finals Fatigue"(main symptom: hair loss), "Interim Itch"(main symptom: itchiness), and "Lutefisk-itis" (main symptom: frail nails). Our job(generously guided by Melissa, who does this sort of thing all the time with real cases) was to determine how the students may have contracted the illness, which one was likely living on the St.Olaf campus in these students, identify it as an outbreak or not, and determine steps for moving forward and keeping the rest of the student body safe. Melissa gave us each roles in the investigation (as people who were infected, controls, and/or interviewers), and when we were "out of character", we'd step back and analyze any new information as if we were working on an outbreak investigation. What we found out in the end through many hours of creating situation reports, interviewing(and follow-up interviewing) multiple cases, designing and carrying out a diagnostic case-control study, and analyzing many data points with the help of statisticians was...that the most likely cause of the symptoms was Lutefisk-itis. We concluded that because out of the healthy control subjects, only one had eaten lutefisk, whereas a majority of the cases had eaten lutefisk, this was the most significant data point. This was a preliminary conclusion, and in a real CDC investigation, far more days would go into determining the cause of an outbreak, but the data so far that we had analyzed suggested Lutefisk-itis, brought on by the Lutefisk served in Stav hall during Christmasfest week. Upon figuring this out, we held a pretend media report, while groups of 3-4 would go up at a time to answer questions from the media/concerned community(this group was our classmates, pretending, which was fun 😊). That part was really difficult, but Melissa coached us as to how to answer the questions in such a way that acknowledges the concern but has minimal interpretive potential-called "single overriding communication objectives". 

Overall, it was a really eye-opening day, as I had been expecting! I learned what it is like to be in the mind of an epidemiologist, and the challenges that they face every day. Melissa took an entire workday to do this with us, and I am certain that her generosity will be well-remembered by everyone on this trip. I'm really looking forward to the next few days here, and to continue to learn about what public health looks like from the perspective of the government offices here at the CDC. Tomorrow we'll get to hear from many speakers, one of whom works on reproductive health(which is along the lines of my CIS project!), so I'm especially looking forward to hearing from her. 

Goodnight!
-Anna

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Day 3(1/5/18) *Atlanta/CDC*

Image
Our group with Melissa '06, our host! Welcome to day 3! The number of things that we've done in these past 3 days is so great that I am surprised that it's only day 3-so many speakers, tours, experiences. I'm glad I'll be writing in this blog so I remember everything we do:)  Speaker #1: Matthew Biggerstaff, ScD, MPH (Influenza forecasting/statistical modeling) To start off the morning, we heard from Dr.Biggerstaff who works primarily in forecasting previous and future flu outbreaks. "How does one do that?" was my first thought. "I'm glad someone knows how to do that" was my second. It turns out that it's an incredibly complicated process, and that there are actually four different forecasting approaches that one can use to create a forecasting model: statistical(use historical data and info about external drivers), mechanistic(use knowledge about the infection process of the flu), machine learning(look at social media to track...
Read more

Day 25(1/27/18) *Chamonix*

Image
Welcome to day 25! Today was an excursion day to a little ski village just outside of Geneva, called “Chamonix” (it was Paul’s suggestion that we all visit this village as a class!). It’s in France technically, so now it’s safe to say that in this trip I’ve been to the US, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany AND France (and soon to be Poland too!) Like many of the places where we’ve traveled, Chamonix reminded me of a movie set; I could try to describe it using words, but it’s probably best if you look at the pictures!                                       I was actually feeling quite sick this morning, but wanted to go on the trip anyway since it’s not everyday that I get the chance to visit a ski village in the alps! I certainly did not regret it, but I paid for it in the evening since the changes in altitude aggravated the headache I already had, and it p...
Read more

Day 23(1/25/18) *Geneva/United Nations*

Image
Day 2 of United Nations talks! Welcome to day 23, a busy day at the UN filled with plenty of very interesting talks. So, let's begin! Speaker: Lawrence Fioretta , United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Top 3 things to know: 1. The UNHCR was created after WWII and was only supposed to exist for 3 years, but thankfully has existed ever since! 2. Currently, there are 22.5 million refugees worldwide, and 40.3 million internally displaced people (meaning they’re people who have been forced to flee their homes, but have not or cannot cross out of their country’s border) 3. There are three pillars that the UNHCR tries to use in order to best help refugees: 1)voluntary repatriation (once the person’s home country is guaranteed safe, they send them back home) 2) Local integration (settling the person into an asylum country, hopefully establishing school/work/community) and 3) 3rd country resettlement (moving the person to another country that’s differ...
Read more