tsmith

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Tara C. Smith

Associate Professor, lab rat (microbiologist/infectious disease epidemiologist) and occasional blogger, full-time nerd.

Posts by this author

August 18, 2013
The first person to enter the lab in the morning, has to complete a check of all equipment that makes the lab operational. There is a checklist and you go through all floors of the facility and document the status of every piece of equipment and levels on every pressure gauge. Then you do a visual…
June 21, 2013
Student guest post by McKenzie Steger Off the southeastern coast of Australia lies a small island that in the 1700 and 1800’s was inhabited by the very worst of Europe’s criminals and is now the only natural home in the world to a species named after the devil himself. Decades later beginning in…
June 21, 2013
Student guest post by Sean McCaul Image Source:  http://www.cejournal.net/?p=1934 The next time somebody in your office or household has the flu, you might want to consider keeping your distance.  A new study published this month in Nature Communications suggests that about half of the…
June 20, 2013
Student guest post by Bradley Christensen No, this isn’t a clip from a science fiction movie.  Although dramatic, this does occur in the brains of some people and animals around on our home planet.  What is a prion you ask?  Prions are almost as mysterious to the scientists that research them as…
June 20, 2013
Student guest post by Kyle Malter In many areas of the country there is a vile blood sucker that lurks in our forests, our parks and even our backyards.  What concerns us is not what this creature takes but rather what it leaves in our body after it bites us:  corkscrew shaped bacteria called…
June 19, 2013
Student guest post by Julia Wiederholt I don’t think there is a single person that can claim to have never had the joyous experience (sarcasm intended) of suffering from the influenza.  We all recognize the common symptoms that accompany this infectious little virus taking up residence in our…
June 19, 2013
Student guest post by Brandon Woods A Dangerous Paradise From jungles with jaguars to crystal blue lakes with freshwater sharks, Nicaragua is one of the most beautiful and dangerous countries in Central America. The brilliant biodiversity attracts millions of tourists each year and the looming…
June 18, 2013
Student guest post by Carrie Ellsworth During the summer of 2010 I spent two months in Ghana studying a parasite called schistosomiasis. We worked in a small town called Adasawase to determine prevalence and treat the schoolchildren who were infected. We were told that schistosomiasis was not a…
June 18, 2013
Student guest post by Molly Stafne Nothing could be worse than watching your seven-year-old lying in a hospital bed fighting for his life after being diagnosed with hemolytic uremic syndrome. Unfortunately, Mary McGonigle-Martin experienced it first hand as her son, Chris, fought for his life after…
June 17, 2013
Student guest post by Naomi Kirschenbaum Although we can never know, there are estimates in the range of 15,000 displaced pets in the wake of 2005 Hurricane Katrina.  Many of the dogs found their way to shelters and homes in our community around the Monterey Bay in California.  As a local…
June 17, 2013
Student guest post by Jack Hamersky After successfully completing a job interview I had the opportunity to take the next step in my employment process: taking a Tuberculosis or TB test.  I have received the test before but never really understood the point of testing for a disease no one ever sees…
June 17, 2013
Years like this are rough on blogging. As previously noted, I teach an every-other-year spring course on infection and chronic disease. Well, every summer I also teach an intensive course (basically a semester crammed into a week) on the topic of applied infectious disease epidemiology: taking what…
April 27, 2013
It's time for this year's second installment of student guest posts for my class on infectious causes of chronic disease. Fifth one this year is by Nai-Chung Chang.  Of the many health problems that everyone is bound to have at some point, influenza, or just “the flu,” is one of the most prominent…
April 26, 2013
It's time for this year's second installment of student guest posts for my class on infectious causes of chronic disease. Fourth one this round is by Kristen Coleman.  If you are anything like me, you have been told countless reasons over the years why we must watch what we eat, keep our…
April 26, 2013
It's time for this year's second installment of student guest posts for my class on infectious causes of chronic disease. Third one this round is by Jack Walsh.  The Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) infection is one of the most significant global health challenges of this 21st century. Since the…
April 24, 2013
It's time for this year's second installment of student guest posts for my class on infectious causes of chronic disease. Second one this round is by Jonathan Yuska.  If you happen to be one of the 46 million individuals who have not been swayed to quit smoking by the countless anti-cigarette ads…
April 23, 2013
It's time for this year's second installment of student guest posts for my class on infectious causes of chronic disease. First one this year is by Dana Lowry. Humans have a long history of illness and death from infectious diseases. It wasn’t until the 1790s that we had a solution. Edward Jenner…
April 15, 2013
Temple Grandin is undoubtedly one of the most famous women with autism of our time. Trained in animal science, Dr. Grandin is a widely read author and noted speaker on autism. April is National Autism Awareness Month, and Dr. Grandin has a new book out, "The Autistic Brain." Together, this must…
April 10, 2013
I have a new article up today at Slate, examining the emergent H7N9 avian influenzas, and a bit of a review of "bird flu" in general: While we were carefully watching H5N1 in Asia and Europe, another influenza virus—2009 H1N1—appeared seemingly out of nowhere. Ultimately traced back to swine, this…
April 3, 2013
Dear Pa, I know you care deeply about many issues, especially social justice. You're tired of wars, you're ashamed of the attempts to destroy social programs in this country, you hate seeing the unions that helped you as a worker provide for our family get dismantled by wealthy CEOs whose only goal…
March 7, 2013
And now for something a bit different. I've mentioned before that I'm a big fan of zombies. So, I was intrigued when I started seeing press for Warm Bodies, a book by Isaac Marion about a zombie who is, well, not your typical zombie. Recently released as a feature film, I read the book a few weeks…
March 1, 2013
Fifth of five student guest posts by Jonathan Yuska The saying, “The more you know, the more you can control,” is no more meaningful than when used in the context of HIV detection and prevention. Public health advocates endlessly stress the need for knowing one’s status; and one would assume that…
February 27, 2013
Third of five student guest posts by Dana Lowry In 1911, Peyton Rous first discovered viruses can cause cancer.  A chicken with a lump in her breast had been brought to Rous by a farmer.  Rous prepared an extract that eliminated bacteria and tumor cells and injected this extract into other chickens…
February 26, 2013
Second of five student guest posts by Nai-Chung N. Chang Tuberculosis (TB) is a major disease burden in many areas of the world. As such, it was declared a global public health emergency in 1993 by the World Health Organization (WHO). It is a bacterial disease that is transmitted through the air…
February 25, 2013
First of five student guest posts by Kristen Coleman Every morning as I prepare for class, I go through the same internal dialogue, “to wear or not to wear my hearing aide.” I am forced to do this because when I was a child I, like most American children (about 80% by age 3 as estimated by the…
February 25, 2013
It’s that time again. I teach a class every other year on infectious causes of chronic disease, looking at the role various infections play in cancer, autoimmune disease, mental illness, and other chronic conditions. Each year, the students are assigned two writing assignments-–to be posted here on…
February 22, 2013
For those of you in the general vicinity, the University of Iowa Department of Epidemiology will be once again sponsoring the Great Plains Emerging Infectious Diseases Conference on April 19-20 in Iowa City. This year's keynote speaker will be Dr. Peter Daszak, President of the EcoHealth Alliance:…
February 18, 2013
I have a post up today at the Scientific American Guest blog, discussing how an earthquake and denial led to prairie dog plague. It details an outbreak of plague in Victorian San Francisco--the first time plague hit the United States--and the many downstream consequences of that outbreak (which…
February 13, 2013
Readers may be familiar with Matt Damon's charity work with water.org, an organization he co-founded. Water.org seeks to raise awareness of the lack of clean water by almost a billion people on earth, and lack of toilets by almost 2.5 billion--and more importantly, they work to remedy that…
February 7, 2013
I didn't grow up on a farm, but my dad did. He was the youngest of 13 kids, several of them who grew up to own farms of their own. As a kid, my family had almost an acre in the country, but the only animals we kept on it were stray cats and the occasional opossum (the latter, not on purpose). Still…