Student posts
tsmith | June 17, 2013Years 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's known about ID epi and learning how to actually "do" it. For this course, which this year was exclusively taken by either DVM students or practicing veterinarians training for their MPH degree, their final assignment is a writing assignment. It's pretty wide open: they can write about any area of…
tsmith | April 24, 2013It'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 in print and on television, here is one more piece of evidence that may have you second thinking that next puff. On top of the more than 3,000 chemicals and heavy metals already identified in ordinary cigarettes1, upwards of a million microorganisms per cigarette have also been found to live and…
tsmith | April 23, 2013It'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 recognized that milkmaids never contracted smallpox but suffered from a more mild disease, cowpox. Jenner took pus from a cowpox lesion on a milkmaid’s hand and placed it in an incision he made in an eight year-old boy’s arm. He then exposed the boy to smallpox; the boy didn’t contract the disease,…
tsmith | March 1, 2013Fifth 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 any way in which the most amount of people can be tested would be beneficial for the population1. The Food and Drug Administration shared this same idea when they overwhelmingly approved the first ever over-the-counter (OTC) HIV testing kit in 20052; which in theory, sounds like a promising way to…
tsmith | February 27, 2013Third 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—tumors grew. Rous suggested “a minute parasitic organism” was causing the tumor growth, which is now known to be a virus. However, Rous’ discovery remained very controversial, and it wasn’t until 1966 that he was awarded a Nobel Prize for his discovery. Since Rous’s discovery, researchers have…
tsmith | February 26, 2013Second 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 when an infected individual coughs, sneezes, speaks, or sings. However, not all individuals who contract the disease will display symptoms. This separates the infected into two categories, latent and active. Latent individuals are non-infectious and will not transmit the disease, whereas active…