My job at the CDC

I have been here a little bit now. I'm starting to know what I will be doing here the whole year. I have a few different activities.

1. Outbreak investigations
This is probably the most exciting part. I am on the tuberculosis team and when there is an outbreak of tuberculosis and they request the CDC's assistance, then I accompany the team. We try and find out who has the disease, how much it has spread, and get people started on treatment and look for ways to control for outbreaks in the future. These trips are usually in the US, but can be anywhere in the world. (Tuberculosis outbreaks happen in the US more than I thought, often in homeless shelters or prisons.)

I am actually leaving for 4 weeks to investigate an outbreak on some small islands in the middle of the Pacific, leaving in mid-Oct. Keiko will be visiting her family in Japan during that time.


2. Analytic Epidemiology
This means I analyze data to try and come up ways to solve public health problems. The most common thing I have seen is people look for risk factors for diseases. For example, the CDC found out that lacking folic acid was a risk factor for many types of birth defects (mostly dealing with the spine). Now folic acid is in many cereals and lots of foods and those birth defects have drastically dropped.
All tuberculosis cases have data reported to the CDC from the whole country. It's a lot of data. My job is to look at it and try and find ways to help improve tuberculosis prevention. I have a few projects going on right now.
Most of the actual work for this is using computer programming, which I get to use more of my engineering hat for which is a nice break from the straight memorizing of medical school.

3. Surveillance
These are projects where we collect data or monitor a disease. I will be doing a project of doing tuberculosis surveillance of islands in the Pacific.


4. Public health education
We have many classes and seminars to help us learn. It's kind of up to us what to take. I can take classes on Microsoft Excel or computer programming, etc. I can go to conferences to learn about tuberculosis. Unfortunately, the dates don't work out for almost all the conferences my supervisor had planned for me.


5. Publications and presentations
I am supposed to present and write about the research I do. I hopefully will be able to fly to a research conference in New Orleans this spring and present some research and get an article published in a medical journal. Maybe even more than one.