Epidemiology

Never really considered epidemiology as a field, but I put an application in for a position as an epidemiologist for after I graduate.  Then, I started thinking...

I've had a ridiculous amount of related coursework, employment history, and no little amount of interest in the field and its social connectedness.  I've worked on the medical side with (para-professional) diagnosis and treatment of disease, disease reporting, disease prevention and even training others in disease prevention both medically and through sanitation efforts.  I've done record screening and reporting of tracked diseases as well as administered diagnostic tests.

I worked for a number of years in the pest control industry.  While my main focus was social insects which do not (generally) cause medical problems, I also helped others and received training in treatment of commensal pests--like rodents and bed bugs--as well as educating clients in avoiding potentially disease-causing pests through integrated pest management* (IPM) techniques.

In school, because I started out as pre-nursing, I took the full complement of basic healthcare core classes such as human anatomy, physiology, pathophysiology, and nutrition as well as microbiology and introductory chemistry.  After settling on the anthropology/psychology/biological trajectory of interest, I continued studying social and biological interactions which included a lot of coursework in sexual activity.

The last few semesters, I’ve been accumulating analytical tools in the form of statistics, analyzing institutions—including health related institutions—and agent-based simulation where—interestingly—the main group project was looking at influenza transmission and social networks.  Probably my favorite course was actually a summer course on Disease and Human Evolution.  

So, maybe my perspective on epidemiology is biased by discussions of Dr. John Snow and the legwork to identify Cholera in London as well as some of the genetic studies on HIV and tuberculosis, but I think it could be fun to do for a couple years.  

Who knows?  If I get lucky, maybe I could work while doing a graduate degree?  My interests in human interaction at a behavioral and biological level has a pretty good chunk of pathology involved as well.

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*- IPM are methods to treat pest infestations by identifying environmental and social factors related to the pest and altering those in order to limit the need for pesticides.  An example is removing moisture near the walls of a structure against termites and clearing and removing harborage (living spaces) for crickets by sealing cracks in a house's walls.