{"id":31,"date":"2017-01-26T16:11:58","date_gmt":"2017-01-26T16:11:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/fall-winter-2016\/?p=31"},"modified":"2021-01-08T09:33:24","modified_gmt":"2021-01-08T17:33:24","slug":"ground-zika","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/fall-winter-2016\/ground-zika\/","title":{"rendered":"Ground Zika"},"content":{"rendered":"

Meeting biologists and epidemiologists who<\/strong>\u00a0 are trying to solve the Zika virus epidemic in Puerto Rico inspired Moira Dillon \u201918, a recent intern at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Puerto Rico Department of Public Health.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was very grateful for the opportunity to learn what a response to something like this looks like\u2014it takes many scientists but also so many other people working to engage with the community,\u201d says Dillon, a mathematical and computational biology major and recipient of the Ben Huppe \u201914 Memorial Internship for a Sustainable World.<\/p>\n

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The on-the-ground realities of a career in public health were on full display during the six weeks she spent in Puerto Rico during summer 2016,, assisting a team in modeling the Zika virus and potential rates of microcephaly. \u201cI came down with computational skills in hand to help with anything that came up,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

She supported a team working to determine the percentage of pregnant women in Puerto Rico who were being tested for Zika each week. The symptoms of Zika are usually mild\u2014a fever, a rash, a feeling of fatigue\u2014and only about 20\u201325 percent of people infected with Zika show symptoms at all.<\/p>\n

I was very grateful for the opportunity to learn what a response to something like this looks like\u2014it takes many scientists but also so many other people working to engage with the community. \u201d
\n\u2014 MOIRA DILLON \u201918<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Moira Dillon \u201918 presents her research on the Zika virus during the fall Community Engagement poster session.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cSo what that means is that for most people who get Zika, they\u2019re fine, there aren\u2019t severe health consequences. But the problem is that Zika does affect different populations in very severe ways\u2014Zika can be passed from a mother to a fetus, and when that happens the baby can be born with microcephaly,\u201d says Dillon. \u201cSomething the CDC in Puerto Rico is working very hard on right now is making sure they\u2019re testing every woman who\u2019s pregnant. One of the things I worked on this summer was developing a model to see how well they\u2019re doing that. While they know how many women they are testing each week, they don\u2019t know how many women they should be testing each week, so the goal is to come up with a way to figure out those numbers.\u201d<\/p>\n

After her experience in Puerto Rico, Dillon is considering perusing a master\u2019s in public health or epidemiology, or a PhD in immunology. \u201cIt was inspiring yet also very challenging to be a part of the response to this virus and to witness firsthand the impact it is having around the world.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Meeting biologists and epidemiologists who\u00a0 are trying to solve the Zika virus epidemic in Puerto Rico inspired Moira Dillon \u201918, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/fall-winter-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/fall-winter-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/fall-winter-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/fall-winter-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/fall-winter-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/fall-winter-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/fall-winter-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/fall-winter-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/fall-winter-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}