West Nile Surveillance - Week 2
Hi all! It's been a blast reading everyone's experiences over the past few weeks.
Last week, Sabrina and I finished up our second week of mosquito trapping for West Nile Virus surveillance in Jefferson County, CO (Photo of Sabrina at one of the traps below). We're currently trapping at 5 sites, but will add 1-2 more sites in the coming weeks. This past week we got to experience all the ups and downs of field work - a couple balmy days, some torrential downpour and thunderstorms, and 100 degree weather to round out the week. The rain on our trapping days made our mosquito yield a bit lower than anticipated, but that gave us more time to really hone our mosquito identification skills. As someone who has never worked with mosquitoes before, I'm grateful for the extra time to get through the learning curve.
I've also been tackling going through Jefferson County's historic surveillance data dating back to 2003. The goal is to get all this data organized and uploaded to VectorSurv. Prior to working with Jefferson County, I've worked in both academic and industry labs, but have never worked in the public health field. It's been interesting to see how data management differs between these industries due to the unique goals of each industry.
It looks like it might be another wet week of trapping, but fingers crossed it's successful!
That's a good amount of sites to be trapping at! I'm sure you have a lot of specimens to be go through and identify. Are you looking for a specific species of mosquito or are there several that your research is looking at? It's also really interesting that you say that the data management differs widely between academic labs and public health. I would've thought they would be similar!
ReplyDelete