Parasite Playground
In a July 21, 2006 article in the New Haven Advocate, reporter Carole Bass wrote about a trip to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
You might think a public health "boot camp" for reporters at the CDC would furnish a week-long break from politics. And indeed, the 23 journalists who convened there during the last week of June did spend most of our time in a windowless auditorium, watching PowerPoint presentations on "The Ecology of Disease" and "The U.S. Public Health Infrastructure." There were no sessions on the Lieberman-Lamont race, no gubernatorial gabbery, no aldermanic antics. Just doctors and scientists teaching about E. coli and cyclospora parasites, tobacco and TB and the H and N proteins that characterize flu viruses. I didn't read a newspaper all week.
Ms. Bass included commentary on a "boot camp" session about Cyclospora:
The morning's session is a case study in cyclosporiasis--yet another gastrointestinal illness caused by a microscopic parasite known as cyclospora. The disease was unknown in North America until 1996, when three Canadian businessmen came down with it.Trainer Jeanette Stehr-Green walks us through the steps that epidemiologists took to track down the source of the outbreak. The Canadians, it turned out, had recently returned from a conference in Houston; many other attendees also developed diarrhea after the conference. By piecing together accounts of what food was served and what was eaten both the sick and non-sick people, Texas public health officials determined that California-grown strawberries were to blame. After they tracked a second cyclosporiasis outbreak, also in Houston, to California strawberries (from a different farm), the Texas public health department issued a warning about the berries.
The article is an interesting lesson on how the CDC engages reporters who cover health issues, and on what a reporter learned hands-on in a week in Atlanta.
