Week 10 at GCHD

 Week 10: A Fun (and Busy) End


This was my last week at the Health Department, which was naturally a bit bittersweet. Though I’m eager to get home to spend time with my family and friends, I’ve had a great time working for the office and learning about vector-borne diseases. Thankfully, this week was decently busy, so I got to spend time helping out in a lot of ways to get through this final stretch. 


            I started off the week mostly doing fieldwork, as it had rained at the end of the week last week and I suspected I may be able to find some larger tick counts. Since it’s now August, tick counts were still pretty low, but I managed to find a bunch of larvae throughout the county, and the occasional nymph still looking for a blood meal. Oddly enough, when I was at one of our more forested locations, I managed to find an adult female H. longicornis tick, which was the first time I had found one myself while on a tick drag. It was definitely older, and a bit beat up, as I noticed under the microscope that it was missing a leg and looked weathered. It was odd to see an adult so late in the season, but not unheard of. At this point, I’ve conducted about 45 tick drags over the past 10 weeks, so hopefully the data Melinda gets from that will be useful in the future.


            In order to ensure a smooth transition after I leave, I spent some time teaching the other intern, Aiden, how to sort and process all the ticks collected during drags. I caught him up as to how to identify species and life stages based on morphological characteristics and went over the process of filling out the various spreadsheets we use depending on the species/life stage. It also gave me time to reflect on how much I’ve learned about ticks and tick-ID, as I remember stumbling through tick sorting just a couple months prior.


            The week ended with a meeting with the researcher we share dour data to, who went over her project in more detail, and Melinda and I were able to clarify questions she had about our data and Melinda’s goals for her surveillance program. We also finally received the testing results from the ALH and Dermacentor ticks we’d sent to the State lab last month, and so we got to get a better idea of the risks these species pose to the public for the first time.


            I’ve had a great summer out in Garrett County, and I loved all the learning I’ve done. Seeing the impact of my work for healthcare providers, researchers, and the public alike has been really rewarding and a great way to recognize the importance of research and surveillance when it comes to health threats such as these. 

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