It's funny, in a way, but I wouldn't have thought about applying for that field of work until recently. Two things changed though, okay three things.
First, in the last few months I've been to several presentations that specifically connect disease transmission to social behavior, especially small group or network based social behavior, and it really got me thinking because--for one--I understood almost all of the gist of these things and--for two--I see it's closely tied to my interests in social and biological interactions of people at a small group level. I mean, disease is and has always been part of the consequences of interactions for a really long time if you look at some of the phylogenies of diseases like tuberculosis.
Second, I've realized that the common factor of most of my adult work history is disease identification, treatment, prevention, and reporting. As a medic and as a field sanitation team member, I pretty much ran the gamut on dealing with disease including everything except diagnosing it in a lab. I even got a little biological weapon defense training in there.
As a pest control tech, although my specialty was wood destroying organisms, most of the training and techniques also covered disease-transmitting organisms as well including commensural pests (like rats and mice) and some additional training about mosquitoes.
The other two jobs--reception at a vet clinic and admin in a medical office--included awareness of zoonotic diseases (from animals to humans) and various immunization and disease reporting schemes. I also was one part of the patient/owner disease prevention scheme through education on immunization and basic measures like sanitation.
In all of those areas, the use of personal protective equipment and hygiene versus disease or toxin transmission was pervasive. After a while, it becomes almost second nature.
In school, starting as pre-nursing got me basic microbiology, nutrition, anatomy, physiology, pathophysiology, and disease transmission knowledge from a more academic perspective. My lack of desire to enter the hospital environment as a nurse was actually driven by my awareness of means of disease transmission as well as the complaints of nurses I knew about their "in-between status" from patients to organization to doctors. Instead, I shifted toward biological, cultural, and psychological bases of behavior.
My upper division coursework includes a number of disease and epidemiology related courses--Disease and Human Evolution, Endocrine Physiology, Health and Social Relationships, etc.--ans some that are connected in other ways--Social Simulation, Rules, Games, and Society, Developmental Psychology, etc..
So, after a fashion, I've been unintentionally preparing myself for understanding epidemiology from both a biological/medical perspective and a socio-behavioral one. I can even see myself applying for a graduate degree in epidemiology or using a disease transmission based approach to look at evolved human behavior if I go straight anthropology.
Third, I applied because I need a job. Beyond the interest in the field, I also need to get me some income and--from my history--I know that I tend to last only in jobs that pique my interest in some way. The commonality, historically, that kept me interested was finding solutions to problems. Whether it was identifying what could be wrong with a patient--even if I could only pass the patient along to a PA or doctor--or figuring out what type of insect it was crawling out of customer's wall with only their memory to work from, I enjoyed that aspect of the job.
The manual labor--boring holes through walls with a roto-hammer or hauling around a ruck, a rifle, and an aidbag--were just the dues I had to pay to do the interesting bits.
So, maybe I'll get lucky...
No comments:
Post a Comment