Rockies and High Plains Vector-borne Diseases Center Summer Internship

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 bac...

  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 uploade...

Hi everyone! My name is Rebecca Blackwood and I'm an MPH student at the Colorado School of Public Health, CU Anschutz campus. Starting next week, I'll be working with Jefferson County Public Health on their West Nile surveillance for the summer.  A little about me - I graduated with a bachelor's in molecular and cell biology and immunology from UC Berkeley in 2020. After spending some time in a covid diagnostics lab in Lake Tahoe, I moved to Colorado in 2021 and have spent the last 3.5 years working for a biotech company developing a point-of-need diagnostic device for the pre-symptomatic detection of infectious disease. While I loved my time in biotech, I'm really looking forward to getting field work experience with RaHP VEC.  In my free time, you can find me out in the mountains backpacking, biking, skiing, or climbing. I love a good book and enjoy making extremely mediocre artwork. Looking forward to reading all your blog posts and hearing about your experiences thi...