Steph Andreescu: Final Weeks with St. Lawrence County Public Health

Wow, I can't believe the summer is already over and my time with NEVBD has wrapped up! The last couple of weeks have definitely been a rewarding way to close out my summer.

One of our recent highlights has been opening a brand-new collection site in our county. After a season spent working at our established sites, it was exciting to set up somewhere new and learn how to set up all the traps in a new area. Another highlight was finally catching Uranotaenia sapphirina, a special species that is the basis of the blood-meal analysis project I mentioned earlier in the summer. It's a tiny mosquito named for its iridescent, sapphire-blue scales that give it a jewel-like shimmer under the microscope. It's unusual among mosquitoes for feeding primarily on invertebrates like earthworms and leeches rather than humans or other vertebrates. I definitely think it's one of the most beautiful mosquitoes we've seen all season, and I've featured a photo I took of one under a microscope below.




Looking back at the entirety of my internship, I'm shocked at how much faster I've gotten at specimen identification. What used to take me several minutes and back-and-forth checking of keys now often takes me less than a minute. I am very grateful that this experience allowed me to split my time between the field and the lab. I loved collecting in the forests in the mornings and then settling in to the lab in the afternoons. While my future career is more healthcare & medicine oriented rather than rooted in biological surveilance, I truly appreciate the time I've spent learning about this valuable side of public health. I am extremely proud of myself and my fellow interns' service in helping keep our county safe from infectious disease.

Thank you, NEVBD!

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