NEVBD-TEC Summer Internship Program

 It is time for my last blog post.. how crazy that 10 weeks have flown by and summer has come to an end! The experiences and knowledge I gained here will be carried with me for the rest of my life, whether it be basic research and field work skills, public interactions, or looking out for mosquitoes! I was also incredibly lucky to have a great group of girls with me, consisting of my co-intern and summer sanitarian, who made everyday feel like a new adventure!  In my final blog post I will tell you all about the organization of our data that we collected. On the field, once a trap is collected, whether BG Sentinel or Gravid, we would place a small piece of paper inside the trap that included the location, the date, time, and approximately how many mosquitos seemed to be inside the collected mesh/bags. At first, this was a horrifying experience as you are sticking your hand inside a bag that contains possibly hundreds of mosquitos, but as time went on, it became very routine! O...

 While gravid traps made up most of our weekly trapping, we also worked with BG-Sentinel traps, which are designed to target more aggressive mosquitoes than the ones we catch in the gravid traps! These traps are set up completely different in comparison to gravid traps because instead of using "stink water," they use a fan, collection bag, 2 6-V batteries, and two attractants to draw mosquitoes in. The first attractant is dry ice which is a source of CO2, mimicking the carbon dioxide humans release when we breathe. The dry ice was hung right above the collection bag, usually from a nearby tree branch. The second attractant is called a "BG lure" which mimics what humans are supposed to smell like. PS: It smells unlike anything I could describe and definitely not what I think we smell like, so it is incredibly strange and cool! Another part of the internship that I really enjoyed was our days at community gardens. We would visit gardens throughout Philadelphia to look...

 Hi everyone! A little introduction about myself: My name is Defne Gumus and I am a rising senior at Bucknell University. I study biology on the pre-med track (and am also doing a theatre minor)! For the past 8 weeks I have spent my summer NEVBD internship with Vector Control Services at the Department of Public Health in Philadelphia. It has been an insanely insightful past 2 months and I never knew working with mosquitos could have taught me this much about field work, data collection, or working well with a team! I feel I could best explain the duties of the internship in three different categories. First, is the setting of mosquito traps (whether it be gravid or BG-sentinel), second is dipping for larval mosquito, and third is the laboratory work. I learned so much beyond these three general avenues, including how to do bacterial larvicides, handling complaints, community outreach, and even tick collection, but for the purposes of these blogs I will talk about what I spent the ...