NEVBD-TEC Summer Internship Program

       The first four weeks of my internship have introduced me to many different aspects of vector surveillance and shown me that every day in the field is different. Coming into the internship, I expected to spend most of my time collecting mosquitoes, but I quickly learned that the work involves much more than that. Between mosquito surveillance, tick sampling, and other field activities, I've been able to experience several sides of Suffolk County's vector control program.      Much of my first few weeks was spent assisting with mosquito surveillance. One thing that surprised me was how few mosquito larvae we were finding. Before starting, I assumed we would see large numbers at almost every site, but that wasn't the case. It made me realize how much weather and environmental conditions influence mosquito development and why consistent surveillance is necessary, even when populations appear low. Every trip into the field contributes to a better un...

While on the field, my supervisor taught me and the other interns how to differentiate mosquito larvae from a glance before taking a closer look. We took dips of various bodies of stagnant water, things such as tires, water basins, plastic bins, garbage left standing upright, and puddles of varying sizes.  Every week we took 10 dips all around the city to send it to a lab so that there would be a record of what types of mosquitos were prevalent in specific areas.  From a distance, if there are many mosquito larvae they may look like small dots in the water, and upon closer inspection we found that larvae spasm as they move and look like (in my opinion) sharp and prickly worm-like insects.  By just looking at the mosquitos in their larval stage, we were able to venture a guess as to what the species of mosquito was and what it would look like if it were to hatch into an adult. Some presented light brown or yellow colorings, some were a darker brown or almost black color. (...

 I just finished my sixth week at the Vermont Agency of Agriculture! Time has flown by, and I can't believe I only have a month left. In the past few weeks, I have been administering the Aedes Albopictus surveillance efforts through fieldwork every Tuesday and Wednesday. During my fieldwork, I am refilling and taking samples back from OVI-position and BG-GAT traps. On the other days (Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays), I am usually doing mosquito identification and organizing mosquitoes from other traps, as well as counting eggs and mosquitoes from the traps that I set up. I have also been using computer programs to track and digitize data from the Aedes Albopictus traps. In the past few weeks, mosquito numbers have definitely started to pick up, which is something we have been monitoring and is interesting to see as I compare egg and adult mosquito numbers to previous weeks and previous years. It has been such a great experience so far, and I have already learned and grown so much t...

Here's my update on Weeks 4–6 working at the Virginia Department of Health under the supervision of the Epidemiology team! Week 4: Now that I have gotten the hang of conducting tick drags and have completed multiple drags on my own at the site I selected, I had the amazing opportunity to conduct a drag with the local health department's Epidemiology lead for the county where my site is located. The experience was incredibly informative because I was able to learn more about the relationship between the VDH and local health departments, as well as how responsibilities are divided between the two. Week 5: While I have continued conducting tick drags, my mentor also set up informational sessions to teach us how to organize our data using R so our findings are easier to visualize and analyze. We also had the opportunity to meet with the Epidemiology and Laboratory Capacity for Prevention and Control of Emerging Infectious Diseases (ELC) grant team to learn more about the grants t...

      Roughly four weeks have passed since my last post here! Most of them have gone by relatively quick and smoothly!     Our routine hasn't changed much besides the fact that our team has one new intern now, which is exciting! :D My day is still pretty evenly split in half, with my mornings being spent outside at out collection sites checking and bringing in the CDC, gravid, and DRB traps, and my afternoons looking under the microscope in the lab to identify the mosquitos we collect down to their exact species with very careful practice. I've gotten very confident in my identification skills, having to use our dichotomous key very little at this point with specific species! I get really zoned in during the process and it honestly clears my mind and I find it all quite relaxing! It's been really rewarding looking back and seeing how much I've improved since my first few weeks with the team. At the beginning of the internship, I had to often ask someone to doubl...

 The first trimester of my internship at Garrett County Health Department: Environmental Services has been very exciting and extremely insightful. On my first day I went to help give presentation to elementary school classes and learned how to sample. After that it was off to the races, going out every day and collecting ticks for testing. There were plenty of cool things to see that weren't just ticks as well, spiders, moths, butterflies, and a bunch of other bugs. With probably the coolest I found was a state endangered Baltimore Checkerspot. Which was a really, really cool sight to see. That being said that doesn't mean I was diverting time from finding ticks as well. With the two typical ticks for me to find being Ixodes scapularis and Dermacentor variabilis , those unfortunately weren't the only two species I found in the area. I had also found invasive Haemaphysalis longicornis (Asian long-horned tick)   and more notably Amblyomma americanum  (the lone star tick). U...