Olivia Turcio - Weeks 8 to 10 at Connecticut's Department of Public Health

This marks the end of my NEVBD-TEC internship. I’m very grateful for all of the opportunities I have been given. I connected with many epidemiologists and learned so much from them. I had an amazing time, and I gained so much more knowledge about surveillance. I know that I will be well-prepared for my Master’s courses because of this internship. This also helped solidify what I want to do in the future. When I first started, I honestly had no idea what I wanted to do. I knew that I wanted to pursue infectious disease epidemiology, but the matter of what specific type of infectious diseases and focus was on the back burner. At the end of this internship, I realized that I like working with data but as of right now, I would like to focus on active surveillance. Here is a recap of the last 3 weeks!

Week 8: This week I started conducting my own interviews. After receiving much guidance the previous weeks, I now feel comfortable attempting one by myself. Conducting phone interviews are different than in-person ones. There are more interruptions and more of a likelihood of people not responding. This is due to the fact that some people are not expecting a phone call, and others may see an unfamiliar number and assume that it is a scam. Those that do respond back are mostly responsive and they try to give as much detail as they can. What I learned from conducting these interviews are that there should be more media attention about them. There should be a training or standard that once hospital staff see results and report the findings to the Department of Public Health (DPH), they then notify their patient that they should expect a phone call from DPH. This could potentially help with getting more detailed interviews. I also believe it will help DPH staff with their case classifications and enable more thorough results. 

Week 9: This week I started working on my mini research project. This mini research project is related to a specific lab and their lab results. This lab has inconsistent results which suggest that a certain disease was there when that simply is not the case. First, I go through the data and delete ones that are not relevant to this project. This included names, unnecessary dates, and categories that were not filled. After this, I included data from an alternative lab. This lab had accurate results. The main point is to compare the different results, and note which were a confirmed case, probable case, and not a case. The rest of the week was left going through tick-borne diseases and going through their lab results. 

Week 10: This week I finished working on my mini research project. I conducted basic statistics and created graphs to visualize the data. I separated the data and looked at common trends. It is interesting to see how one hospital tends to use an external lab that has frequent false positives. Maybe there are more people in this county that are outdoors or travel abroad in tropical places. It was also interesting to see the range of the results for the false positives. It does not appear to have a specific cut-off point and all the data was within 3 standard deviations. It leaves me with many questions. Overall, I found working through the data interesting and I know this will be extremely helpful to DPH staff.