Olivia Turcio - Weeks 1 to 4 at Connecticut's Department of Public Health

This marks the beginning of a series of blogs posts I will be making throughout my NEVBD-TEC internship. I’m teaming up with Connecticut’s Department of Public Health (DPH) where I will be working alongside their Vector-Borne Disease (VBD) team. The goal of the first 4 weeks is to get familiar with VBD surveillance tools and learn more from my advisor and her fellow infectious disease epidemiologists about different vector-borne diseases throughout Connecticut and the Northeast region. 

Week 1: This week was an introduction to what activities I will be conducting throughout this internship. I gained access to a couple of DPH resources and reviewed the Public Health 101 Series on the CDC’s website. I also began learning more about different vector-borne diseases. One task that I worked on was creating different infographics and social media posts about Alpha-gal syndrome. Each post and infographic was curated for a specific audience. I found it really interesting to learn more about Alpha-gal since I only had baseline knowledge from a video I watched a couple years ago. It felt like a full circle moment, as I went from just learning about it to creating educational materials about it. 

Week 2: This week I continued working on educational materials for Alpha-gal. However, this time I pivoted away from infographics and social media posts to a PowerPoint presentation. It is always interesting to see how different medias can highlight information and where information may need to be altered to make it more digestible. I also began learning more about what kind of surveillance I will be conducting and what research I will be focusing on in the upcoming weeks. I realized how a large component of vector-borne disease epidemiology requires passive surveillance compared to active surveillance. I began understanding why one surveillance method may be better for certain diseases compared to others. In terms of research, I started some preliminary research on the strengths and limitations on the use of paper case report forms (pCRF) versus electronic case reports (eCR). This preliminary research allowed me to start questioning why there isn’t as much research in this topic. 

Week 3: This week I gained access to DPH’s surveillance tool called Connecticut Electronic Disease Surveillance System (CTEDSS). This manages many reportable diseases and allows healthcare providers, health departments, and laboratories track cases and manage potential outbreaks. Once I started using this tool, I immediately began understanding how important its role is in keeping disease trends up to date. While it was a learning curve, once I went through a couple cases, I was able to get the hang of it. What I found most interesting about this website was how it organized different diseases. It made me wonder how much programming went into making it so comprehensible. I really liked seeing how each drop-down section (specifically the signs and symptoms) is different for each disease. It definitely makes it easier and more intuitive for the epidemiologists working on the case. Outside of working with vector-borne diseases, I also had the opportunity to be introduced to DPH’s food-borne disease team and learn more about their program.

Week 4: This week I continued using CTEDSS and filed lab reports. It is interesting to see how different labs display their data and how some were more straightforward than others. I enjoyed scrolling through the reports and searching for specific data. It kind of felt like detective work. I also gained access to other tools to allow me to conduct phone interviews for individuals who may potentially have a vector-borne disease. I was also able to attend a DPH Epidemiology and Emerging Infections (EEIP) meeting with all the infectious disease epidemiologists and learned about new and on-going cases and outbreak investigations from each DPH program. I enjoyed hearing what the VBD team and foodborne team spoke about. It was interesting to see what was similar and different about their work. Both teams told me how their work is largely seasonal and how they can easily track when a specific disease season starts and ends. The foodborne team also told me how important interviews are and how most of these diseases require it. This is compared to the VBD team, who has interviews too, but more with the provider than the patient. These interviews also largely depends on the type of disease. I finished this week by working on my eCR research and I began coming up with some ideas about what data I will be looking for.