Mosquito trapping weeks 3-5

West Nile surveillance over here at Jefferson County Public Health is progressing smoothly. Sabrina and I have added another surveillance site in JeffCo, so we're up to 6 sites total. Last week, one of our sites captured 2,200 mosquitoes, which is more than all the Culex mosquitoes collected in JeffCo from 2010 to 2020 combined. This made for a long day of ID-ing, but we're getting very efficient at ID-ing those little guys. This site is also a bird sanctuary, so I'm particularly interested to follow it for the summer given that West Nile is an avian disease.

In the past couple weeks, I've also had the opportunity to shadow JeffCo's epidemiology team, as we had our first suspected West Nile case a couple weeks ago. It ended up not being a true West Nile case, but it was interesting to see the human epidemiology side of the surveillance work we're doing.

When not in the field, I've been continuing to work through past years' surveillance data, dating back to 2002. Some of this data is still only on paper, so it's been an adventure getting all this data into a format that's usable for data analysis. Fingers crossed I'll be starting the analysis part soon!