As long-term readers know, I've previously featured student posts on various topics of their own choosing. I'm doing it again this year with my summer course on Applied Infectious Disease Epidemiology. In this course, students learn to take the theories and information from a basic ID epi course and apply them to real-world experiences--analyzing math models, determining the cause of an outbreak, and designing their own studies to test a research hypothesis, for example. As part of the course, communication is also a big segment, examining how information (and misinformation) is communicated over the internet and beyond, and learning how to work with media. Their final assignment is to write a blog post at a level laymen will understand on the topic of their choice. The first posts will begin to pop up tomorrow--enjoy, but please be kind (and constructive!) with any comments or criticisms.